I’d like to add to Mike Gordon’s rebuttal to “Gun laws in U.S. don’t make sense.”

Mike made valid points as to the term “machine gun” that is misused as a synonym for common, semi-auto firearms all too often. However, there is a lot more to buying a true machine gun than even he stated. For the sake of saving space, a good tutorial on the subject is at https://www.gunowners.mn/automatic_weapons. In a nutshell, even the sheriff himself would have a ton of ATF red tape, expense and hoops to jump through if he wanted to personally own a machine gun. There are scads of gun laws  and regulations on the books already — trouble is, most criminals don’t care about laws.

As for magazines (not clips) that hold more than eight rounds. Why not? Many, many people have self-defense weapons and capacity is a plus. The last thing anyone in a bad situation would want is for the hopper to run dry before the situation was neutralized. The cops aren’t necessarily always just minutes away. That is a major reason why the 9mm caliber is so popular with law enforcement, capacity.

I won’t get into the AR15, etc. here except to say the majority of them are 5.56 mm NATO caliber — the exact same thing as a .223, a medium to long(er) range caliber that until recent years the DNR didn’t consider powerful enough to legally hunt deer with.

It is not a Republican or Democrat issue. There are radical extremists on both ends of the spectrum. Be it guns, racial issues, religion or a multitude of other subjects, I believe we just need to get back to something that isn’t very common anymore. Common sense.

Mark Nicholson

Wells