Fox News "personalities" Bill O'Reilly and Gretchen Carlson have both advocated for an "assault weapons" ban in the past two days. Certainly Ms. Carlson has gotten a lot of grief from viewers for her uninformed view or misrepresentations.
Here is the poll if you want to chime in (currently running 73% opposed to 27% supporting such a "ban");
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/the-real-story-with-gretchen-carlson/question-of-the-day/2016/06/14#Here is a HotAir article about Carlson with video of her advocating the ban:
Fox anchor: Time to reinstate the assault-weapons ban
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/06/15/fox-anchor-time-to-reinstate-the-assault-weapons-ban/Here is my comment posted to the Fox poll page:
Ms. Carlson is uninformed and/or ignorant and/or lying. Anyone who knows the realities behind the arbitrary and capricious made-up definitions of "assault weapon" and the statistics regarding homicides by such semi-automatic long guns knows that fists and feet kill many times more people annually than "assault weapons" (and "bladed weapons" 10 times more). They also know that the 1994-2004 "Assault Weapons Ban", according to the Department of Justice, had no effect at all upon crime rates.
Charles Whitman, in 1966, killed 16 people using a bolt-action rifle. If you have a premise that "any weapon that kills ANY number of people, no matter how relatively small compared to other weapons, must be banned to enhance "public safety"", then you have to ban not only ALL firearms, but also knives, hammers, pipes, etc., and, somehow, fists and feet.
And of course you just can't ban "new sales", you must confiscate all such existing weapons when there are hundreds of millions of them in circulation, as well as prevent any from being acquired via black markets, smuggling, home manufacturing, etc.
It's either ignorance, or a charade to masquerade some other agenda. Civilian disarmament will definitely aid in accomplishing certain goals, but "public safety" will not be one of those goals.
Ms. Carlson is simply wrong. Whether that is through ignorance or intentional misrepresentation I have no idea. The facts are available, and could easily fill several books (see: John Lott, Dave Kopel, etc.), and unfortunately most people aren't interested enough to spend the time to learn the details of the issue. We all lose when the ignorant control the law.