Don’t forget the 60,000 strong force that is allowed to stop anyone within 100 miles of a border, ask for papers, and put anyone they like, including American citizens in jail without trial or normal legal process, sometimes for years.

> put anyone they like, including American citizens in jail without trial or normal legal process, sometimes for years.

So in a country of ~330 million, with 32 million flights every year across the US, would you mind listing the total number of times that actually happens? Where people are detained for years with no due process by that 60,000 force. If something happens a few times per year at that scale, while being shameful non-the-less, it's a freak outlier in fact and is not a legitimate example of common outcomes to support your comment.

The bans will, for the most part, be useless, as most gun bans based on features usually are. To see why, look up e.g. "MARS action rifle", or "lever release AR-15".

At the same time, countries that don't bother with stuff like that, but instead regulate who can own firearms much more stringently than US does - e.g. Czech Republic - are doing fine.

This ban while strict is actually more than the cosmetic 'assault rifle ban' given the strict magazine size limits for all but essentially 'varmint gun' calibers. One can debate the effectiveness of it but the features of some actual substance in this case.

It's more substance than usual for sure. My point was that it's still not going to prevent the next terrorist from doing more or less the same thing. The only way to make this kind of regulation sensible is to stop chasing implementation details, and have some standard testing protocol for actual performance (e.g. rate of fire), then set limits on that.

Magazine capacity limits are relevant in principle, but the problem is enforcement - they're just too simple to effectively regulate. Even defining what a limit is can be hard, given that it's a box with a spring, so the limit inherently depends on what cartridges can fit and feed. As Canada has found out, this means that a 5-round magazine can be a 15-round magazine sometimes. But even when you have a clear definition that accounts for all such shenanigans, good luck enforcing it when one can make high-cap mag bodies by cutting legal ones, and duck taping them together. Again, it's a metal box with a spring, not even curved in many calibers; most complicated parts are the follower and the feed lips, and those are the same regardless of capacity.

I'd still look at their definitions first, though, because in most countries (and US states) that limit magazine capacity, a full-sized magazine that is blocked internally by some kind of pin is perfectly legal, and yet that pin takes about 50 seconds to remove without breaking the magazine. There's a lot more security theater about gun laws in most places than people realize.

> At the same time, countries that don't bother with stuff like that, but instead regulate who can own firearms much more stringently than US does - e.g. Czech Republic - are doing fine.

I think you'd have said the same thing about New Zealand a week and a half ago, yet here we are.

And are they any better now? If you looked up the things I mentioned in my earlier comment, you know that UK has firearms available to civilians that aren't particularly less lethal than what the Christchurch terrorist used. They haven't been used in a similar way yet for the same reason why New Zealand didn't have any problems for over 20 years before this - because these events are so rare in general.

OTOH, looking at New Zealand's eligibility laws, one thing that stands out to me is the lack of a mandatory mental health exam. So it's like US in that regard - only already-diagnosed mental health issues can block ownership.