I had a conversation with an anti recently. I typed up a long message for her which I will post below. Personally I try to get a few things across to them.
1. Having lots of ammo or lots of guns really doesn't mean much. When dealing with a collector or target shooter things are different. Jay Leno has more cars than I will own in a lifetime. Why does he need so many cars? Tiger Woods has more clubs than I will ever own. Lance Armstrong has more bikes. The fact is each of these people is into a sport/hobby. Not every gun is the same and people who are into a hobby often have lots of bikes/cameras/clubs/cars/computers/etc because for them each is different in some sort of meaningful way.
Lots of ammo is also a non-issue. I explained that a bullet that cost $1.20 each at Walmart can occasionally be had for a very good price somewhere else. Costco is a store that is based on the idea of buy in bulk to save money. If you are serious about shooting then going through 200 rounds in an afternoon isn't that much. How many golf balls do they hit at the driving range?
High capacity magazines are another non-issue. So long as a magazine can be swapped quickly it's not a big improvement to restrict to 10 shots between reloads. In fact the army would tell a shooter to take your time and aim. It's probably better that the shooter sprays and prays vs aims carefully (I wouldn't actually share that last part). Anyway, if the shooter only had 10 round mags he likely would have practiced changing them and the results would be the same.
The final point is banning "Assault Weapons". I don't like the term but it's easier to just acknowledge that if we had an idea of what people think of when they think AW then the semi-automatic AK-47 and AR-15 pattern rifles would certainly qualify. Let's suppose that I was FOR banning these guns. I'm not but I'm trying to make a point. What do you ban? The 1994 law clearly showed that if you are too loose in your definition the gun makers will walk around the intent of the law. The politicians can of course really try to tighten the laws. Then we end up restricting all sorts of guns people aren't mad about. Really, this guy could have likely achieved the same result with a pair of .40 pistols and a bunch of mags. The AR was likely theatrics as much as anything. So even if he couldn't get that gun, he could get non-scary guns and kill just as effectively. God forbid he could have added a few Molotovs to the mix. Are we going to outlaw gasoline and wine bottles?
As I see it the only way to really try to stop the mass shootings would be to pass a law that was so draconian that guns simply couldn't be automatic and you couldn't reload them quickly (how do you outlaw stripper clips?). Any law that did that would probably violate the recent SC's decisions on the second amendment.
Anyway, below is what I wrote to her.
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The question as to whether or not rifles such as semi-automatic versions of the AR-15, AK-47 etc should be specifically restricted is a legitimate one. I would like to avoid the term “Assault Weapon” as there hasn’t been a good, clear definition. So let’s just assume we agree on this point. This is a bit like, what is an inappropriate display of skin. In some places topless people on the beach is considered normal while in other places women showing their lower legs would be an extreme display of skin. Also, to be clear, any gun that fires more than 1 bullet per trigger pull is heavily restricted and CAN NOT be possessed by the average person in any state without a good bit of paper work and the approval of the FBI. In the US you have no right to own an automatic weapon.
I hope that we would agree that a law that has a large negative side yet little positive affect on a problem should be avoided. For instance we might try to reduce speeding by demanding that all new cars come with a display that shows the speed limit of the road you are on right now. Even more extreme would be to require that system to be retrofitted to older cars. So this system would clearly have a cost burden but how often are we speeding because we don’t know the speed limit. Sure on occasion this system would work but overall the cost would be high and the impact on speeding would be low.
So on to guns.
Perhaps the first question is do these weapons have legitimate purposes? Some claim since they aren’t needed for hunting (and I agree) they aren’t needed. Well hang gliding isn’t needed but people enjoy it. Motorcycles are more dangerous than cars but we let people ride them anyway. Some people enjoy shooting these guns for target practice. So certainly they have a legitimate purpose (sport/enjoyment) for people who enjoy shooting them legally BUT the constitution doesn’t protect something just because we enjoy it. So the next test is do they have a legitimate self-defense use? Well, yes… kind of. During the LA riots some Korean store owners protected their property from looting by camping out on the roof with similar rifles to scare away the riffraff. However, I think that’s not a strong argument and I would certainly agree that a gun with a 5 or 10 round capacity could have done the job just as well. Thus I would lean towards the idea that, no the guns have no significant legal use beyond recreation.
So if we accept my claim they have no use beyond recreation should we ban them? Well now we get into the other part of the issue, will the ban actually have a positive impact on gun crime or will we simply restrict access for the largely legal use of these guns?
According to the military an “Assault Rifle” must be able to fire more than 1 bullet per trigger pull (and some other things). So it’s easy to say a gun is not an Assault Rifle, just see if it can’t fire more than one bullet per pull. No clear definition exists for “Assault Weapon”. The 1994 Assault Weapon’s ban illustrated one of the biggest issues with gun regulations. The law must clearly define what should be illegal and what should be OK. The ’94 law tried to define an Assault Weapon based on a number of characteristics that are often part of the semi-automatic weapons that we would agree are “Assault Rifle like”. Manufactures were told they couldn’t have two or more “assault weapon features” on a single gun. So the manufactures quickly designed away the offending features and sold largely the same gun but now 100% legally. The only clearly definitive restriction was the 10 round magazine limit. From 1994-2004 it was illegal to sell any newly manufactured magazine that could hold more than 10 rounds. The intent of this restriction is presumably to reduce the volume of fire in cases like we recently saw.
But does any of this work? What is an “assault weapon”? The problem with most of the ’94 restrictions is they were simply cosmetic. Things like a flash suppressor, bayonet lugs or pistol grip don’t make a weapon more deadly. The basic rifles with a few superficial changes were again legal under the 1994 law. This is to be expected. The gun makers want to stay in business. If you tell them what they can’t do, they will obey but they will also respond to the market and that can mean finding loopholes. So long as the weapon can fire semi-automatically and can fire lots of shots we aren’t solving anything by passing new laws. New loop holes will be found and exploited.
The limit on magazine capacity, unlike the cosmetic features, can be quickly and easily tested. However, as scary as the concept of high capacity magazines sounds, it’s a red herring. So long as you can quickly switch magazines and carry a number of loaded magazines the shooter can reload and keep firing. The 3 seconds needed to reload the gun won’t prevent tragedies like this. So while the notion of a 100 round magazine is scary, it has only a limited impact on the crime.
For argument sake, let’s assume we implement the 10 round limit anyway. There are millions of high capacity magazines already on the market. Those will still be available for purchase and a determined person will just buy used instead of new. Alternatively we could attempt to confiscate high capacity magazines. I think collecting all these untraceable magazines would be impossible and even if we did succeed, you are still left with the ugly fact that a bunch of 10 round magazines can still kill a bunch of people.
So it seems to me that the only way to really stop this sort of thing is to slow the rate of fire AND the rate of reloading. One bullet per trigger pull is perhaps too fast. At that point you would be banning perhaps half the firearms sold in the US each year and certainly affecting arms that have legitimate self-defense purposes. Alternatively we could ban the use of interchangeable magazines. You could then fire 10 shots as fast as you want but now you are out of ammo. That sounds good on paper but in practice it probably won’t work. The manufactures will invent ways to quickly reload arms. The M1 Garand, the US infantry rifle in WW2, is loaded using a clip of ammo (not a magazine) with 8 bullets. The rifle can actually be reloaded faster than something like an AR-15. So the M1 would be legal under a “no removable magazine” rule but still is able to be reloaded very quickly.
My point to all this is that to make the restrictions really work you have to remove the large population of rifles and high capacity magazines already in the public hands AND you have to use very strict limits that would not only outlaw the weapons we want to see removed but also many weapons that we acknowledge do have legitimate sporting, hunting and self-defense purposes. If you don’t go that far you have a law that does little to nothing to stop crime but does financially harm and burden legal gun owners.
The discussion about new laws is always one to which we should be open. However, we also must understand that there are practical limits to what we can legislate.
She has shown an interest in guns and I'll help her with that.
