We've had reasonable gun control laws before. What would fall into an unreasonable precedent?
Sorry, it's been a long day.
Categorical weapons bans are a thorny problem because, in principle, they represent a 'foot in the door' for the state's limitation of further categories, citing prior bans as precedent. There were several rulings (I don't have the case numbers handy at the moment) where district courts and even SCOTUS narrowly blocked total firearms bans in several jurisdictions, and those measures were largely built upon the precedent set by the Assault Weapons Ban from the Clinton administration. (This might also be a good time to point out that semi-automatic rifles of the sort used in several recent mass shootings are only responsible for
maybe one percent of gun deaths nationwide; the overwhelming majority are inflicted by handguns.) Truthfully, that legal precedent is the only substantial purpose another assault-weapons ban would serve, considering how many provisions of such proposals focus on the aesthetic characteristics of a weapon and have little bearing on its lethality. But getting back to the point I was attempting to make, it only becomes easier for the state to block access to each subsequent category of firearms once they deem them an adequate threat to public safety. More practical and less Constitutionally risky measures exist - the limitation of magazine capacities, mandatory minimum waiting periods on anything beyond a revolver, and the elimination of waiting-period and background-check loopholes and exemptions for gun shows come to mind - that don't involve feel-good Band-Aid fixes, meaningless political footballs, or old-media fearmongering over Scary Black Guns™.
