The Gun-Control Delusion

T he Democrats dream of banning particular kinds of firearms, from the descendants of Eugene Stoner’s AR-15 to the common 9mm handgun.

This is not going to happen.

The question has, in fact, already been litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, which in its Heller decision considered the issue of firearms that “are commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes today” and held that any “categorical ban of such weapons violates the Second Amendment.” The AR-style modern sporting rifle and the 9mm handgun are two of the firearms most “commonly possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes today,” and a ban on either weapon would be unconstitutional.

There are many people who believe that the Second Amendment is outmoded, a relic of 18th-century thinking, and there is a reasonable, good-faith argument for that position, though it is not one that I find ultimately persuasive. But the Second Amendment is still there, irrespective of whether President Biden or Nancy Pelosi thinks it should be. We have a process for amending the Constitution, and we have repealed amendments in the past. Yes, it would be politically difficult to repeal the Second Amendment — we created the Bill of Rights to make it difficult to remove legal protections for Americans’ civil rights.

As I have argued before, the Democrats’ position vis-à-vis firearms is not a matter of ballistics but one of aesthetics. There isn’t anything especially dangerous about the 5.56mm semi-automatic rifles that give suburban progressives the willies. They fire a round that is less powerful than that of a typical deer rifle, and they have the same rate of fire — one round for one pull of the trigger — as a revolver and most other common firearms. They can be fitted with magazines that hold 30 rounds — or 50 rounds, or 100 rounds — but that is true of any firearm with a detachable box magazine, which is a feature of the great majority of modern rifles and handguns. You can tell that this is a matter of aesthetics from the fact that the old 1990s ban on so-called assault weapons took a largely aesthetic approach — among other things, it put firearms on the naughty list merely for having a lug on which to mount a bayonet. The 1990s were pretty wild, but there weren’t a lot of bayonet murders. Folding stocks and bayonet lugs didn’t have any practical effect on crime in the 1990s; they just offended some refined progressive sensibilities.

President Biden fixates on the 9mm handgun, and he also says that all you need to defend yourself and your family is a shotgun. A shotgun is very effective for that purpose, because a single shot from a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 (“double aught”) buckshot inflicts damage equivalent to being shot nine times with a 9mm handgun. President Biden’s position is, in short, “You shouldn’t have that dangerous weapon, because it is dangerous, and instead, you should have this much more dangerous weapon.” It is incoherent, but Joe Biden has always been incoherent — this is not exclusively an effect of his senescence.

Bans on this or that common firearm are nonstarters politically and dead-on-arrival constitutionally. They shouldn’t really even be part of the conversation.

What is on the table are “time and place” regulations, which are a good deal less controversial and which can — and should — be managed at the local level. The Second Amendment protects a fundamental right to keep and bear arms, and that fundamental right belongs to every American irrespective of his place of residence. But we federalists appreciate that even the fundamental rights may be implemented with some variation among and within the states. There isn’t any reason that the local gun regulations in Manhattan have to be identical to those in Brewster County, Texas, or Niobrara County, Wyo. The same principle under which we exclude carrying firearms onto commercial flights might as easily apply to city subways, nightlife districts such as the French Quarter or Sixth Street, etc. Indeed, even in gun-friendly states such as Texas, there are many places where a firearm may not be carried, some of them determined by legislation and some of them privately determined under Texas’s firearms-trespass law, which has the fortuitous statutory designation of Section 30.06 (“thirty aught six”).

There may be room for prudent changes to time-and-place restrictions, but these are not going to have much effect on either ordinary violent crime or homicidal spectaculars such as the ones recently carried out in Buffalo and Uvalde. We have lots of ordinary gun crime, much of it related to gangs and the drug trade, because we do a poor job of isolating the serious violent criminals in our penal system — the average murderer in the United States has at least five prior arrests and one conviction before he gets brought in for homicide — and because we routinely refuse to enforce the gun laws we already have on the books. If you get arrested carrying a gun illegally in one of the crime-ridden neighborhoods of Philadelphia or Baltimore, you have an excellent chance of walking away from the case scot-free, and a pretty good chance of avoiding jail in the statistically unlikely event that you are convicted.

Horrifying events such as the massacre in Uvalde are much rarer, and much more difficult to police and prevent. One thing that is important to understand about these killings is that they are expressive violence; because that is the case, in almost every one of these situations there are indicators that the perpetrator might carry out mass violence before he actually does, including in many instances an open declaration of intent to do so. Unlike the more common kinds of murderers, these killers often have no criminal records, and we never have the chance to use the tools of the criminal-justice system to keep them off the streets or to keep guns out of their hands. We have instead the much less robust tools of the mental-health-care and public-education systems.

There are institutional failures across the board: in the criminal-justice system, in the schools, in mental health care, in communities, and, most consequentially, in the family. It is delusional to believe that we are going to solve those problems by enacting new retail regulations on sporting-goods stores.

But then, delusion is very much in fashion right now.