Assault rifles, like the M4A3 Bushmaster in my gun safe, are made for one purpose: to kill people as quickly and efficiently as possible.
If the government has to ban the sale of them to reduce the number of nuts that can get their hands on one, I am all for it. The prices for them would skyrocket. Criminals would be scrambling to get them. But the number of mass killings by crazies who went to a gunshow or pawnshop, bought one and opened up on people would go down. If you have to make it harder for everyone to get them in order to make it harder for the nut jobs to get them, so be it.

One way to deal with this problem would be to treat assault rifles like they do machine guns:

http://smartgunlaws.org/federal-law-on-machine-guns-automatic-firearms/

This was a common sense law restricting ownership of fully automatic weapons.
It was passed in the middle of, you guessed it, Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

Hey Split,
You have lots of friends left. You have made some great posts here and contributed to the overall relevance of this really special and different place. I like a person who is passionate about their beliefs. I guess my long-time career in the classroom has made me hyper aware of diversity and the fact that other people have feelings that I can unintentionally hurt if I am not very careful about what I say and do.
It is kind of like carpentry: measure twice, cut once, because once the board is cut too short, no amount of cutting can fix it.
Keep measuring.
Keep cutting.
Stay strong in your beliefs, knowing others may disagree, but that it doesn’t mean they have to be your enemy. The world would be a very boring place if we all were the same.
M

Happy 4 U!!!

Yes, It is hard to understand. I sailed through as well. I really was worried that I was just mixing some lactose from China. I just knew I should be feeling something unpleasant for it to actually be a powerful medicine,
M

Wow!
I’m glad the government let’s me live in a small, rural state and own 38 firearms. Check Japan’s gun laws and murder rates.

See, that is how crazy this liver crap is! Six months before my diagnosis, I suddenly came down with exactly what Ariel is describing: horrible, bloating, hiccups with dry heaves with only this white, tasteless foam as a result from the toilet hugging. Lost 50 lbs. in 12 months. I mean, I had a “cast iron” stomach-until that night. In fact, that sudden onset and chronic inability to properly ingest and digest even the blandest foods led to my HCV diagnosis.
All of that ended two weeks into tx. So it wasn’t stress from knowing I had HCV that caused it. Since it disappeared about the time the virus did, I can only conclude the two are related somehow.
Weird.
M

On drug pricing and politics from a recent HCV Reasearch and Hews article:

The elephant on the sidelines is the U.S. government itself, which would have significant negotiating power — if it were allowed to negotiate, which it’s not. This part of the issue is one of the wonkiest subjects to have percolated into the 2016 presidential race, with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both promising to combat high drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate. Among Republicans, using the government’s bargaining power against the drug industry is a non-starter — with the notable exception of Donald Trump, who perhaps can’t resist the chance to use the government’s power to wheel and deal on a truly grandiose scale. Trump has claimed that allowing Medicare to negotiate could save $300 billion, but that is almost certainly a huge overestimate since, in 2015, the total Medicare prescription drug spending for its part D benefit was projected to be $85 billion.