In response to the news that there had been two mass shootings in the state of California in the space of only 48 hours, President Joe Biden did Tuesday morning what he often does when faced with a complex societal problem: He talked confidently about something else. In a hastily released statement on the topic, Biden urged “both chambers of Congress to act quickly” and send an “Assault Weapons Ban to my desk.” Tragedy, meet non sequitur.
The notion that the ambitions of nihilist mass murderers are likely to be meaningfully constrained by arbitrary limitations on the way that certain legally available firearms look is fanciful and unsubstantiated at the best of times. Here, though, the claim does not even intersect with the incidents on which Biden has predicated his call. California already has all of the gun-control laws that the Democrats wish to add federally — including a strict ban on so-called “assault weapons” — and those laws made no difference whatsoever. And how could they have, given that in neither case did the gunman use one of the commonly owned rifles that Biden’s coveted “assault weapons” bans typically target; instead, they used a couple of standard semi-automatic handguns.
Because the term “assault weapon” doesn’t mean anything useful — and because those who decide what counts as an “assault weapon” care more about aesthetics than functionality — one of those standard semi-automatic handguns happened to be banned under California law simply because it resembled a weapon that also comes in automatic form. But it wasn’t an automatic weapon — and, indeed, it had no features that made it more or less lethal than any other semi-automatic handgun that remains legally available in the state. If President Biden’s definition of “assault weapon” now includes 85 percent of all handguns manufactured in the United States, he ought to say so explicitly.
Jumping on the bandwagon, Dianne Feinstein echoed Biden’s call by insisting that “we were tragically reminded this weekend of the deadly nature of assault weapons.” But, of course, we were reminded of no such thing. Rather, we were reminded that it does not take sophisticated weaponry to inflict a great deal of damage on innocent people. One can do it with a car, or a bomb, or, as in the two California attacks, the sort of quotidian firearms that are typically ignored by the gun-control movement. The mechanisms inside the semi-automatic handguns that were used in California have been legal in the United States since the administration of Grover Cleveland — that is, before the invention of penicillin, fixed-wing aircraft, and recorded video. Under a plain reading of the Second Amendment, those mechanisms are presumptively protected by the Constitution, but, even if they were not, they would likely remain legal in all 50 states. Asked last year by Gallup whether they favored restricting the possession of handguns to the police, nearly three quarters of the American public said that they did not.
There is no obvious answer to the problem of mass public shootings, and, by implying otherwise, President Biden is doing a profound disservice to the voters he serves. Leaving aside the constitutional and political problems that such a move would present, it remains the case that there is no clear statistical link between the prohibition of so-called “assault weapons” and the rate of mass shootings — let alone the three-fold decrease that Biden has promised. By cynically expanding the definition of “assault weapon” to cover nearly every new handgun that is sold in the United States, Biden has taken what was already a false promise and turned it into an epicene fantasy. We have a word for that sort of behavior, but it’s not “leadership.”