With the recent tragedies there has been a lot of talk of gun control laws and in particular reviving the Assault Weapon ban from 1990s. I am going to assume the best motives for those people who favor a ban on assault weapons, but in doing so at best I can say is that they are misguided.
Before I get started let me state that I’m working from a couple of premises.
One – That a desire to ban any class of firearms is advanced with an objective of a reduction in firearms deaths.
Two – The whenever anyone proposes a restriction of rights, the burden of proof is on those advocating the restriction. When in doubt I err on the side of granting rights rather than restricting them.
So in its simplest terms the argument for an assault weapon ban appears this way to me: banning assault weapons will reduce firearms deaths.
While the argument is very simple, it is built upon subsumed premises. The most undefined of these is the term Assault Weapon. It appears to apply to nearly any semi-automatic rife which resembles a fully automatic military rifle. Already the argument is flawed, as we are quickly sliding into issues of cosmetics, but let’s assume definitional issue can be surmounted.
The next underlying premise is that the law would have general and wide-spread compliance; that the population would turn in their forbidden devices, and refrain from trading them in any illicit markets.
Evidence from European countries that have enacted weapon bans is that compliance is at best spotty, and Americans are notorious for the flaunting of authority. One only has to look to alcohol and narcotic bans to see the American character as work. There is no evidence to support the argument that American would have high rates of compliance with such a ban.
Let’s also assume that a high compliance rate could be provoked through some sort of public awareness campaign. (Highly unlikely, but I’m trying to give those in favor os a ban every measure of doubt, no matter how dubious.) We now have a situation where assault weapons are unavailable, and there is no illicit market to supply them, what’s the next premise?
The next premise is in my opinion the least likely one yet, that the hypothetical murdered, either run of the mill type or a spree killer will, foiled in his attempt to obtained an assault weapon, refrain from using a non-banned gun to achieve his goals. Shotguns and semi-automatic pistols are deadly as well, and hand guns are in reality the weapon of choice for all forms firearms related murders. In some studies the rate of ‘assault weapon’ use for murder is as low as 0.12%, not even a full percent. Is it at all credible that the criminal we are trying to thwart will give up because he can not use an AR-15, ignoring the century old .45 caliber 1911?
Is this really a good argument for violating the rights of law abiding citizens? That is what you are advocating when you ask for this ban. You are asking the state to go to people who have obeyed the law and who have caused no trouble and seize their legal property and be branded criminals. All for a laws that will in all likelihood have no effect at all, as studies have shown when we last tried this in the 1990s.
It is easy to regulate rights that you yourself do not exercise, but those are the right you should defend the most.
Shotgun Joe Biden!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jafkVM-jnbE&feature=player_embedded
One last point.
I think most of the people who support bans on rifles are not well informed on the subject. (No thanks to the news media which has done a terrible job reporting on this subject over the last 30 years. Even today they repeat claims proven false over 20 years ago!)
Another factor is those low-information supporters are not aware of any costs associated with rifle bans. As far as they are concerned it is a zero cost zero risk policy. Just a step in the right direction. If it saves one life it is worth it! We have to do something! For the children. Etc.
I think if more of those casual supporters were informed that there are costs and significant costs at that, they might change their mind. Are they really willing to throw their neighbors in jail over a weak theory of gun-control? They need to hear stories about the victims of gun-control.
Such as the story of US Army veteran Nathan Haddad…
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/21/a-gun-tale-of-two-cities/
The controversy over self-loading rifles, the so-called “assault weapons”, is bizarre because even though public opinion and court opinion have been most hostile compared to other gun controversies, the actual legal and public policy justifications for restricting such firearms are the weakest. In fact the effort against “assault weapons” is the most fraudulent of a series of frauds perpetrated by the gun-control movement since the 1980’s.
I often make the point that self-loading rifles kill about as many people in the United States as lightning strikes. I recently discovered another interesting comparison, apparently the New York City subway system kills about as many people in accidents as are murdered by “assault weapons” in the entire United States! Perhaps billionaire anti-gun crusader New York City Mayor Bloomberg should look closer to home before splurging so much of his fortune to ban rifles.
Of course public attention has been focused on this issue because of the Newtown massacre. The claim has been made that the AR-15 rifle and other so-called “assault weapons” promote mass shootings in the United States because of their firepower. But actual crime scene evidence does not support that accusation.
Typically these massacres occur where the murderer is able to corner or pursue a large concentration of unarmed defenseless people. That circumstance is the almost universal constant in these tragedies, not “assault weapons”. In Newton, the murderer Adam Lanza had almost twenty minutes to fire on helpless children before the arrival of armed authorities. When those authorities arrived Lanza didn’t shoot it out with the police, he almost immediately killed himself instead, which is also very common in these types of incidents.
So did the AR-15 Lanza used make any real difference? Lanza killed 26 people in the 20 minutes he had to fire. Reportedly Lanza fired about 100 shots, and the vast majority of his victims were in a single classroom where the children cowered in mass in a corner of the room as Lanza methodically shot them.
Even a single shot breech loading rifle is credited with an aimed rate of fire of five rounds per minute. In twenty minutes that is 100 shots. So did the AR-15 with 30 round detachable magazines make any real difference in Newtown? I would say no.
In fact in 1999 during the height of the last Federal ban on “assault weapons”, Eric Harris used a 10 shot rifle as his murder weapon of choice at a Columbine High School. That rifle was designed to comply with the Federal ban in every way, yet it remained a perfectly suitable implement for mass murder of unarmed victims.
If self-loading rifles were being used in shootouts with police, or massacres at gun stores or any where else there are armed people, there might be some merit to the hysterical claims made by the gun-control movement against “assault weapons”. But that isn’t what’s happening.
Rifles of all types are rarely used for any criminal violence in the United States, perhaps 2.5%, let alone the smaller subset of rifles which are called “assault weapons”. Rifles are not a significant crime problem, period. Bans on rifles will not reduce the number of murders, it will only waste precious law enforcement resources enforcing a pointless (and likely unconstitutional) law.