We're not talking about soldiers with military training here. We're talking about untrained criminals, or people with mental illness, being able to easily shoot and kill a large number of civilians. (i.e. people without body armor, etc.)

Despite the fact that Republicans make fun of the arbitrary nature of what constitutes an "assault rifle"--semi-automatic fire, large capacity removable magazines, pistol grips, etc.--those qualities do make it easier for untrained people to quickly kill a bunch of people.

if they make it easier for untrained people to kill, then how come the military doesn’t use them when training? How come you can still find service weapons without pistol grips? The argument is that pistol grips don’t in fact make it easier it makes it more accurate. We don’t want less accurate, this argument wanting less accuracy was already tried in court and failed muster.

Also if you read the regulations why does it state where the location of the webbing of the thumb need to be if the important part is no pistol grip? In reality they are trying to ban AR pattern rifles, not weapons with pistol grips.

Everything else you mentioned makes the gun easier to operate for both criminals and law abiding citizens. Why do the minority get to ruin things for the exhaustively overwhelming majority when these rifles with these characteristics aren't even the problem?

What military are you talking about? I'm unaware of this being used by the any of the US branches since it's incredibly inaccurate compared to either prone firing, kneeling, or standing.

In fact, the only place I've ever seen people firing from the hip are Schwarzenegger and Stallone movies...

Navy, and the point of the drill is to show you taking a quick shot from the hip is better than delaying to aim. It’s also quite a lot more accurate than one would believe, which is another point of the drill.

The USN? Or some other navy? And actually, a quick shot from the hip is far worse than taking a moment to deliberately aim.

USN doesn't train M16 usage in basic; they use a shotgun instead. They DO train you to fire it from the hip, but firing a shotgun from the hip is very different than firing an auto/semi-automatic rifle from the hip.

Yup, a shotgun. And difficulty hitting your target depends on what your loaded with (slug or shot shell). And you’ll hit your target just the same with a rifle. Will you be as accurate as aiming down the sights? Certainly not. Will you hit your target center mass? Oh yea unless your eye hand coordination is real off. And the original argument was that pistol grips make you more accurate than firing a weapon without. There’s still rifles and other long guns without pistol grips used in service. If this were true of pistol grips then we’d retire these guns out of national security.

It depends on if you have time to aim or not. If you don’t, you’re dead.