You have a point there: pistol grips do have a small but useful function.<p>Now, change it to &quot;bayonet mounts&quot;, which is another feature that was listed on the &quot;Assault Weapons Ban&quot; law.  How does having a bayonet aid someone in a mass shooting?  In fact, when has a mass shooter <i>ever</i> had a bayonet mounted on his rifle?  I&#x27;m not even sure why they bother with them any more; I&#x27;ve never seen any pictures with US military servicemen in combat in the last 20 years with bayonets mounted in their M-16s or M-4s.<p>Another thing was flash suppressors.  How is banning those going to prevent mass shootings?  The whole point of a flash suppressor is so the enemy on a battlefield can&#x27;t tell where gunfire is coming from exactly.  Someone walking into a movie theater isn&#x27;t all that worried about return fire, and in a room that size when he enters through the emergency-exit door, it&#x27;s not like he&#x27;s going to be well-hidden.<p>But seriously, the whole thing is pretty dumb IMO.  They tried to ban very, very minor features (pistol grips, flash suppressors, barrel shrouds, etc.), but ignored the things that really made these weapons good at shooting lots of people, namely semiautomatic operation and easily-swapped magazines.  If you want to make mass shootings hard, ban magazine-fed ammunition and semiautomatic operation.  Of course, that&#x27;ll bring you right back to Old West 6-shooters (well, modern .357 Magnum revolvers would still be legal too, but you could also ban that style of revolver where the cylinder is easily opened and reloaded with a speedloader; the Old West revolvers didn&#x27;t have that, you had to reload them one at a time, very slowly).  But of course they know that&#x27;ll never work since people have had semiauto guns for a century or more now and aren&#x27;t going to turn them all in, so they go for a feel-good measure that&#x27;ll make ignorant anti-gun voters happy without actually changing anything substantive.