Have appreciated many posts on here; too many to list them all, but Jeri's & Spaw's were outstanding, IMHO.

For those of you willing to spend some time (38 min) listening to someone who really, really knows what he's talking about, I HIGHLY recommend Fresh Air/Terry Gross's Dec 20, 2012 interview with Tom Diaz, a policy analyst for the Violence Policy Center. It's absolutely packed with all kinds of fascinating (and often appalling) info: facts, figures, history of gun control legislation, history of the NRA, etc, including some facts I believe almost no-one is aware of (I certainly wasn't), and might make a big difference if more people were (see the bits in red, below).

So, I apologise in advance for the vast length of this post, but it's got info in it (I've transcribed chunks of the interview myself, because I think their content is so important) that I don't think is out there much, but really should be.

From the webpage:
"Diaz... and his colleagues have conducted extensive research on gun violence in the United States and have written reports on assault weapons, as well as on the National Rifle Association and the corporations that fund it. What gun manufacturers have done to rejuvenate their markets, Diaz tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, is to emphasize military-derived semi-automatic guns and, in marketing, "appeal to the inner soldier, the insurrectionist feelings and high-tech desires to market these military-style guns." He is "...also the author of the forthcoming book The Last Gun, about changes in the gun industry and gun violence."

"The only difference, Diaz says, between the semi-automatic rifles sold on the civilian market and those issued to soldiers 'is that the purely military rifle is capable of firing what's called 'fully automatic fire,' meaning the gun will continue to fire until it expends all of the ammunition in its magazine."

He went on to say that the semi-automatic rifles sold on the civilian market are (unexpectedly) actually more accurate than the fully automatic rifles issued to soldiers. (~9 min into the interview)

A few more quotes from the link/interview (BF added by me in certain spots I think are useful to emphasize):
"When it comes to potential bills that could be introduced in Congress in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Diaz says it's crucial to focus on this question of magazine capacity. Lawmakers must ask, Diaz says, 'What actually are the design features? What are the real functions of assault weapons? ... Can you put a high-capacity magazine into this gun that will hold 20, 40, 60, 100, 110 rounds of ammunition? And, if that's true, then it's an assault rifle and we will not allow their manufacture or import.'"

On how the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban defined a semi-automatic weapon
"It defined a semi-automatic assault weapon in terms of a gun that had at least two of certain features. One of them was the actual crucial feature, which is the ability to take a high capacity magazine. ... The others were ... almost decorative features that were on these guns, such as a bayonet mount, which means you could put a bayonet on the gun; a thing called a ... flash hider, which means that the flash from the barrel of the gun is less observable; a stock in the rear that could be extended or shortened. ... The requirement that you have at least two of those meant that gun manufactures could say, 'Aha, we can keep the ability to take the high capacity magazine and just knock off the rest of these bells and whistles [and] we still have essentially the same gun, ... but it's now federally legal.' And that's what Bushmaster figured out. They actually rose to prominence after the 1994 semi-automatic assault weapons ban because they took off all the truly irrelevant bells and whistles and just produced a basic gun."

On Beretta's marketing strategy for a semi-automatic pistol that entered civilian market
"Beretta executives... in interviews on public record which we've documented ... said, 'Look, our strategy was this: ... What we want to do is get the cachet of military sales so that we can then turn to the much bigger, much more profitable American civilian market and make a lot more money doing that.' And that's precisely what they did. Beretta's advertising [strategy] to this day ... is, 'This is a gun that we sell to the military. It's made for them but you can use it.' "

The information I personally found most surprising/shocking was about how information that used to be routinely published by government agencies has been silenced by regulations proposed/lobbied for by the NRA... funded by the gun manufacturers. These statistics make clear the link(s) between gun ownership and deaths, which were so blatant that gun manufacturers decided they could not afford to have this info in the public domain.

While they could not force the govt agencies to not collect the info, they could make it illegal for these agencies to use govt/taxpayer money to publish their findings... and effectively silenced them.

Shortly after 2 minutes into the interview, Diaz says:
"Since September 11, 2001, we've spent several trillion dollars on so-called "Homeland Security". We have made changes in our constitutional protections, particularly in the 4th amendment and the 5th amendment, against search and seizure, and self-incrimination, that would have shocked people, shocked Constitutional scholars, before 911. And yet, we spend a tiny amount of money on public health concerning guns; we forbid the Center for Disease Control and Injury, in Atlanta, part of the Public Health Service, from actually researching gun safety... so we have seen "terror" as a great evil, and we've started a "War on Terror". We have no war on guns, and yet, comparing the actual impact on Americans, it's staggering that we have this "War on Terror", and spend so much money, and apparently don't care about gun death and injury... and I say only apparently, because Americans really are not aware of the extent of the problem."

And (~ 14 min 30 sec into interview): (this one isn't word-for-word, but it's VERY close; sorry, but it's taking SO long to transcribe stuff...)
"Let's assume there is a large number of people who use guns for benign purposes (hunting, target shooting)... the policy choice/cultural choice that we face: is that enough; does that balance the bad consequences that we know flow from the easy availability of these firearms? Does that balance the slaughter of children, the increasing killing of law enforcement officers, that we see? ... Because the gun industry and the National Rifle Association have been so very successful in shutting down federal sources of data, for example from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and basically shutting down cogent research from the Center for Disease Control and Injury, we don't really know the extent of the use of these guns in crime because we cannot get even the generic, aggregate data. It's been shut down."...

"You cannot get that information from government sources because, something called the Tiahrt Amendment(*see below), which has basically shut down ATF from releasing data."

Terry Gross: "So this amendment prevents the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from releasing information about what guns have been used in crimes?"

Diaz: "You have that exactly right. ... "...in the early 90s, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms used to routinely release aggregate data, we're not talking about specific investigative files here, we're talking about useful data about what types of gun are used in what types of crime. The gun industry realized that it really loses every argument where you can have facts, so they got Congressman Todd Tiahrt, from Kansas, to sponsor what are called "riders"; you put them on appropriations bills, and it basically says 'ATF, you cannot spend any money to release any of this data.'"

"So immediately, we're shut down. ATF collects by make, model, caliber, data about the guns and the type of crimes they're used in, so we could, for example, were ATF able to release this data, we could say, 'We want to look at Bushmaster. How many of these Bushmasters have been used in how many crimes, and where, in the United States over the... last 10 years?' That data is available in the files of ATF, but it cannot release it. It is forbidden by law from releasing it."

Terry Gross asks what the funding restrictions are on the Center for Disease Control's ability to do gun-related research.

Diaz: "Again, it's another one of these funding restrictions. There was a period of time when the CDC was sponsoring what's called "peer-reviewed research" about gun death and injury, what were the causes, and it was getting uncomfortably close to the question of proliferation of firearms and particular kinds of guns, so the NRA's supporters on the hill actually wanted to abolish this particular unit of the CDC and were calmed down and persuaded to simply make a funding restriction which essentially says, 'The CDC cannot do any research related to gun control.' That has meant that a number of promising research initiatives in universities and in teaching hospitals and what-have-you were shut down, and although the CDC does some very useful compilation of data, they're very careful about the research they do.

"That's another thing I think Congress and the president should look at. We should open up the CDC. We do it for, if a brand of tires has a problem, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration gets to know that within weeks. If there's an epidemic of some kind of disease, CDC's gonna know that within weeks or months. We have an epidemic of gun violence, and we've shut down everybody from looking at it.

At about 30 mins in:
...the NRA at one time... truly represented sportsmen and the benign uses of firearms... and there was a tremendous revolution within the NRA... and it was finally taken over by a much harder-line group of people... and they allied themselves more with the industry, so that there's almost a seamless web of interconnections between the industry and the NRA. I like to say that the NRA... it becomes a kind of laundering machine for the gun industry, and I'll explain what I mean. The gun industry would really appear to be too crass, perhaps, and shocking to say, '...You need to buy our Bushmaster so that you can resist the government, and kill bad people if you have to', so they don't say that. The NRA, on the other hand, has no problem... euphemizing this very same message and saying, 'We need our guns, we need to protect ourselves from tyrannical governments' , the way they phrase it, and their material is really quite provocative and quite shocking. So they've taken one of the messages of the industry, and transformed it into a more-or-less socially-acceptable way of saying it."

About 33-34 mins in:
After saying that any new law would need to address the problem of "Grandfathering" (BIG problem!)... "One thing the president could do immediately, without legislation, that he has the executive power to do, is direct the Justice Department to look at imports, into the United States, of specific kinds of guns. The reason he can do that is, the federal law that already exists, regulating the import of firearms, says that any firearm brought into the United States must have been primarily designed for sporting purposes. And in fact, the first President Bush... and President William Clinton, used this power, and they directed the ATF to take a look at these guns, and the ATF obediently said, 'Well, wait a minute, these kinds of guns are not really primarily sporting', and so they did ban the import of certain classes of assault rifles. President Obama could do the same thing. He could say to the Justice Department, which now is home to ATF, 'Take a look at these imports; take a look at the standard for sporting purposes, and let's weed out the guns that don't meet that.' That would have significant impact on assault rifles, including these assault pistols. It would also have an impact on Guns like the FF47, which was used at Fort Hood, which by no definition, by the industry's own admission, was designed for counter-terrorism use. This is something the President can do with a stroke of the pen."

Perhaps I should start a petition, on one of those sites...

The other "small" step this interview suggests (to me, at least) that we need to make people more aware of the all-too-effective Tiahrt Amendment* (see below), which has gagged our own government's public health/public welfare agencies from providing vital information -- and might ask/campaign for/demand its repeal/non-renewal. This amendment (as far as I can see) basically contravenes the First Amendment (freedom of speech) and should be considered unconstitutional. If push comes to shove, maybe it could even be taken to court by a civil liberties group?

So... this is by far THE lengthiest post I have ever made on Mudcat, and it's taken me WAY longer (i.e., hours!, and I've accomplished nothing else today [sigh!]) than any other post I've ever made, but I'm hoping it will be worth it to have spread some of this (I believe) little-known information to others, and make it more available/accessible to anyone googling for such information. (And I've proofed this at least a dozen times, so if there are still typos, it's 'cos I've read this so many times I prolly just can't see 'em anymore...)

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*Passed in 2003, since then "amended, and continuously included in appropriations bills" The Tiahrt Amendment (from Wikipedia)
...prohibits the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) from releasing information from its firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation. Additionally, any data so released is inadmissible in a civil lawsuit.[5] Some groups, including the Mayors Against Illegal Guns Coalition, believe that having further access to the ATF database would help municipal police departments track down sellers of illegal guns and curb crime. These groups are trying to undo the Tiahrt Amendment.[6] Numerous police organizations oppose the Tiahrt Amendment, such as the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) and the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP).[7] Conversely, the Tiahrt Amendment is supported by the National Rifle Association [8], and the Fraternal Order of Police (although it allows municipal police departments only limited access to ATF trace data in any criminal investigation)."