The assault weapons ban must be reinstated — the greed of gun manufacturers be damned. https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-lives-of-our-children-or-the
The lives of our children or the greed of gun manufacturers?

Friends, Yesterday morning, a 28-year-old armed with assault rifles entered a Christian school in Nashville and fatally shot three nine-year-old children and three staff members before she was shot and killed by the police. It makes me weep. It’s happening again and again and again. Our

Robert Reich

@rbreich And if re-instated it should be done in a smart way rather then the dumb way we've done it in the past.

The dumb way is to specify specific characteristics that are easily evaded by gun makers.

The smart way is to define the ban based on the energy imparted to projectiles over a time span, eg:

Ban all firearms capable of imparting J or more Joules into projectiles within T or fewer seconds.

That is a metric that is quite difficult to evade. It is also quite objective and not subjective at all.

Testing would be quite easy - the hard part is specifying the ammo load that is to be used - which would be the largest the weapon could accept (not an intentionally smaller maximum load specified by the maker but easily ignored by the user.)