My apology if my language about the NRA and parroting was offensive, but your response reinforces my judgment. Certainly maximizing survivability is instinctive, not Constitutionally-determined or an NRA edict. No question, no argument there.

But that's not the point. The free availability of semi-automatic rifles increases survivability of the individual, all right, but it vastly increases the vulnerability of society at large to injury or death. That is what you and the NRA are unwilling or unable to recognize. And some NRA members I've known--hopefully not JC--are willing to subordinate the security of the community to their own. I call them psychopaths--like the wretched souls we see committing the mass murders.

The community will prevail. Eventually the sale of semi-autos will be banned, and those in private hands will be confiscated and destroyed, as the Australians sensibly have done. No, that won't make it absolutely impossible for a criminal to obtain one, but it will be a hell of a lot harder to do, and we as a nation will be safer. There will be fewer bad guys armed for the battlefield, but showing up in nightclubs. Even the good guys with handguns can relax a bit, outgunned far less frequently.