Reaction & Commentary
I’m not arguing on behalf- The court keeps allowing states to ban assault-style weapons. Your inability to do even the common sense stuff really frustrates me. So when do we say enough is enough? A string of high-profile mass shootings over the past few years has spawned a movement that’s calling for new legislation
To outlaw so-called assault-style weapons, in particular the popular AR-15. Assault weapon bans are depicted as life-saving, “common sense” policy. The problem is that the definition of an assault weapon is totally arbitrary. An assault weapon is whatever is covered by an assault weapon ban.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason who writes about gun policy. The criteria that are used to identify assault weapons are things that have little or nothing to do with how useful or how deadly an assault weapon is in the hands of a mass murderer.
We will finally ban these assault weapons from our streets that have no other purpose other than to kill. The federal government banned assault weapons in 1994, when President Clinton signed a bill sponsored in the Senate by Dianne Feinstein. Mr. and Mrs America, Turn them all in.
The bill expired 10 years later, but Feinstein is sponsoring a new version of the law. Meanwhile, seven states and the District of Columbia have enacted their own assault weapon bans. There’s little evidence that the 1994 legislation reduced gun deaths, in part because it was mostly a symbolic gesture.
Unless you really delve into the specifics of what these bills do, you don’t understand how utterly arbitrary they are. In the original 1994 bill and in the new version of the legislation assault weapons are not defined by what they do but by how they look.
Feinstein’s current bill talks about things like pistol grips, adjustable stocks, threaded barrels, in other words, you can have a gun with any one of those features, it is now an assault weapon. Exactly the same gun without those features is not an assault weapon.
And in fact, there are a bunch of examples like that. Let’s compare the Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with the AR-15. One looks like a hunting rifle and the other looks like a military weapon. They fire at the same rate, they fired the same caliber of ammunition
And because they have similar barrel lengths, the ballistics are almost identical. Now those are single shots. If I wanted to fire this on full semi-automatic, all I do is keep firing… Another misconception is that so-called assault rifles are automatic weapons,
Which fire continuously until the trigger is released or the gun runs out of ammunition. The federal government banned the manufacture of new automatic weapons for civilian use in 1986. Most modern civilian guns are semi-automatic, which means they only fire one round per trigger pull. But if you’re talking about, you know,
How many rounds you get out of the gun within a certain amount of time, any semiautomatic is gonna fire be capable of firing the same number of rounds Originally built for the battlefield, a defining characteristic of the AR-15 is the speed and power of the bullet…
Another myth is that assault weapons are more powerful than other guns. In reality, the power of a firearm depends mainly on the cartridge, not the gun. Again, compare the Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifle with the AR-15. Both can shoot the same .223 caliber bullet, at the same velocity.
You will see that lots of hunting rifles are more powerful, uh, can do more damage, uh, you know, at the same distance, uh, than so called assault weapons. One of the most common cartridges used for hunting is the .308 Winchester, which has more than double the impact force
When compared to the ammunition used in an AR-15. Another common refrain is that assault weapons can inherently fire more rounds than other guns before reloading. But it’s the magazine, which is just a detachable box and a spring, that determines how many times you can fire.
And many guns that are not identified as “assault weapons” accept high-capacity magazines. So again, this is not a feature that distinguishes assault weapons from other kinds of guns. Banning guns solely based on appearance is counterproductive and makes it difficult to have a good-faith discussion about effective solutions to gun violence.
I’m not going to say everyone has to own an ar-15, because it’s such a great gun. But people have their reasons for wanting to have them and the government shouldn’t be second-guessing those reasons without a very powerful justification. And the justification offered for banning assault weapons is virtually nonexistent
Because it doesn’t make sense.
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