- Nightmare is shooting someone who doesn’t need to be shot. I.E. your daughter sneaks a friend in during the middle of the night. While you can become proficient in using a flashlight in conjunction with a pistol, it’s hard and again you only have so many hands, a longer gun enables you to mount a light on the weapon to clearly ID the target (and hopefully dazzle them into freezing or running away). Most AR patterned rifles already have rails for mounting lights. An extremely bright light also helps in countering the flash blindess which will occur if the worst happens and you have to pull the trigger in a darkened room.
- Finally, it’s a very flexible weapon with many other uses including target shooting, hunting, varmint elimination, and competitive sports shooting. The ammo tends to be cheaper than most large bore hunting rifles and, as noted above, the recoil much less punishing. This means a person is much more likely to use it, become proficient and comfortable (which means safer) with it than other choices.
FYI interesting bit from SCOTUS orals in Heller-,
First, the relevant DC Court of Appeals ruling sections-
“To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment
protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right
existed prior to the formation of the new government under the
Constituti¬on and was premised on the private use of arms for
activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being
understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the
depredatio¬ns of a tyrannical government (or a threat from
abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the
important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the
citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient
for the Federalist¬s in the First Congress as it served, in part, to
placate their Anti-federa¬list opponents. The individual right
facilitate¬d militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be
barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth
for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second
Amendment’¬s civic purpose, however, the activities it protects
are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual¬’s
enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or
intermitte¬nt enrollment in the militia.”
Pg 53
The modern handgun—and for that matter the rifle and
long-barreled shotgun—is undoubtedly quite improved over its
colonial-era predecessor, but it is, after all, a lineal descendant
of that founding-era weapon, and it passes Miller’s standards.
Pistols certainly bear “some reasonable relationship to the
preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” They are
also in “common use” today, and probably far more so than in
1789. Nevertheless, it has been suggested by some that only
colonial-era firearms (e.g., single-shot pistols) are covered by
the Second Amendment. But just as the First Amendment free
speech clause covers modern communication devices unknown
to the founding generation, e.g., radio and television, and the
Fourth Amendment protects telephonic conversation from a
“search,” the Second Amendment protects the possession of the
modern-day equivalents of the colonial pistol. See, e.g., Kyllo
v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 31-41 (2001) (applying Fourth
Amendment standards to thermal imaging search).
SCOTUS orals discussion
GENERAL CLEMENT: Well, Justice Scalia, I think our principal concern based on the parts of the court of appeals opinion that seemed to adopt a very categorical rule were with respect to machine guns, because I do think that it is difficult – I don’t want to foreclose the possibility of the Government, Federal Government making the argument some day – but I think it is more than a little difficult to say that the one arm that’s not protected by the Second Amendment is that which is the standard issue armament for the National Guard, and that’s what the machine gun is.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: But this law didn’t involve a restriction on machine guns. It involved an absolute ban. It involved an absolute carry prohibition. Why would you think that the opinion striking down an absolute ban would also apply to a narrow one – narrower one directed solely to machine guns?
GENERAL CLEMENT: I think, Mr. Chief Justice, why one might worry about that is one might read the language of page 53a of the opinion as reproduced in the petition appendix that says once it is an arm, then it is not open to the District to ban it. Now, it seems to me that the District is not strictly a complete ban because it exempts pre-1976 handguns. The Federal ban on machine guns is not, strictly speaking, a ban, because it exempts pre - pre-law machine guns, and there is something like 160,000 of those.
JUSTICE SCALIA: But that passage doesn’t mean once it’s an arm in the dictionary definition of arms. Once it’s an arm in the specialized sense that the opinion referred to it, which is – which is the type of a weapon that was used in militia, and it is -it is nowadays commonly held.
GENERAL CLEMENT: Well -
JUSTICE SCALIA: If you read it that way, I don’t see why you have a problem.
GENERAL CLEMENT: Well, I – I hope that you read it that way. But I would also say that I think that whatever the definition that the lower court opinion employed, I do think it’s going to be difficult over time to sustain the notion – I mean, the Court of Appeals also talked about lineal descendants. And it does seem to me that, you know, just as this Court would apply the Fourth Amendment to something like heat imagery, I don’t see why this Court wouldn’t allow the Second Amendment to have the same kind of scope, and then I do think that reasonably machine guns come within the term “arms.”
