Impractical and unconstitutional weapons bans written to create the impression that politicians are doing something useful is not the solution.
After the Atlanta shooting last week, progressives dove headfirst into another round of moral panic about “white supremacy,” even before they knew if there was any racial motivation involved in the killings. When the shooter’s identity inconveniences that well-worn narrative, as it does in the Boulder shooting today, liberals will jump straight to pushing for more useless gun regulations.
In the wake of the latter shooting, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer promised a vote on “universal background checks” this week, even though the Boulder gunman reportedly purchased his rifle at a store, which would mean he had a clean background check (unless someone there broke existing laws). Every tragic event is just an excuse to push another agenda item.
President Biden says we can pursue a “commonsense” agenda to “ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country once again. I got that done when I was a senator. It passed, it was the law for the longest time and it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again.”
The longest time? The Federal Assault Weapons Ban lasted from 1994 to 2004 before sunsetting. Study after study shows that it did nothing to diminish homicides or mass shootings. Once the ban expired, the AR-15 quickly became the most popular rifle in the country, and yet gun violence continued to sharply drop for more than a decade. It’s been clear for a long time that criminality is tied to a number economic and societal factors, and not the type or number of guns Americans own. Mass-shooting trends, in fact, seem to be disconnected from overall gun violence (even when we rely on the gun restrictionists’ arbitrary definition of a “mass shooting,” which doesn’t need to involve a death).
The vast majority of gun homicides and suicides are committed using handguns. Why doesn’t Biden want to ban revolvers? More people are killed by knives than rifles in the United States. More people are killed by fists and kicking than rifles.
On top of the pointlessness of the debate – how many red-state Democrats are going to vote to instantly make millions of their constituents criminals? — an “assault-weapons” ban will almost surely be found unconstitutional. Heller properly found that the Second Amendment was an individual right and protected weapons “in common use by law-abiding citizens.” The AR-15, whose mechanism functions like any other semi-automatic weapon, clearly meets that criteria. And if Biden tried to move forward with a ban, the legislation would almost surely be challenged, and it’s possible that all state “assault-weapons” bans will be found unconstitutional.
It is largely the cosmetics of the rifle, and the twisted desire of mass shooters to use them, that make it a useful political target. If you ban the AR, the killers find another favorite gun. One of the worst mass shooters in American history did his nefarious work using a .22-caliber and 9mm handgun. I don’t pretend to have answers for how to deal with mentally ill or radicalized young men, but impractical and unconstitutional weapons bans written to create the impression that politicians are doing something useful is not it.