Well said, but unfortunately most of my fellow progressives will just disagree emotionally and not engage in good faith. They’re not willing to accept that semi-automatic rifles are not the main problem. Maybe because all they care about is school shootings and don’t care about the more frequent, random violence that involves handguns. After all, even the progressives don’t exactly talk about how they want to prevent gang violence, a major factor in gun violence. And whenever they talk about firearms and suicide, they never link together that this is handguns that people are using to kill themselves.

But semi-automatics are scary and make better talking points, I guess.

Edit: It occurs to me that this is actually probably even more pandering than I realized. Democrats are extremely unlikely to own semi-automatic rifles but not that unlikely to own a handgun. So it’s easy for them to accept semi-automatic rifles being banned while it’s not so easy for them to accept that the handgun they keep by their bedside or in their closet might be banned.