By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, December 08, 2015
Self-righteousness is liberating. The same people who are
most exercised about guns in America, and want to ban and even confiscate
entire categories of firearms, know little about them and evidently feel no
compunction to learn.
The worst terror attack in the United States since
September 11 has become the occasion for another frenzied, poorly informed push
for new gun restrictions.
President Barack Obama gave a prime-time address on the
terror threat, in which he resolutely reaffirmed the status quo in the campaign
against ISIS. Except that he hopes that gun control, one of the signal
political and policy failures of our time, will now be deployed to help foil
the apocalyptic terror group.
Almost every time there is a mass shooting, there is a
rush to push old gun-control chestnuts, regardless of their applicability. The
San Bernardino terror couple didn’t buy their guns at a gun show (making the
effort to close the so-called gun-show loophole irrelevant); they weren’t on
the terrorism watch list (so the proposal to ban people on the list from buying
guns wouldn’t have stopped them); and Syed Farook passed a background check
when he bought two handguns (rendering calls for universal background checks
moot).
The president and the New
York Times, which saw fit to publish a front-page editorial for the first
time since it thundered against Warren Harding in 1920, have fastened on the
two “assault weapons,” AR-15s, used in the attack. The Times called them “weapons of war, barely modified.” President
Obama referred to them as “powerful assault weapons.”
On this question, the Left has fallen for its own
propaganda. Decades ago, gun-controllers decided to play on the confusion
between semi-automatic versus automatic weapons to push for a ban on
nasty-looking assault weapons, even though they are, for the most part,
functionally indistinguishable from other semi-automatic rifles.
The AR-15 is one of those semi-automatic guns. It isn’t
exotic or particularly powerful. It is the most popular rifle in the country.
At least 3.5 million are in circulation. It is lightweight, accurate, and
without much kick. You wouldn’t use it in combat and, in fact, wouldn’t
necessarily use it to hunt. A .223-caliber gun, it is less powerful than many
handguns. Some states forbid .223-caliber rifles in deer hunting because they
aren’t powerful enough to reliably take down the game.
If gun-controllers know any of this, they hide it well.
Nor do they seem to care that a prior version of the assault-weapons ban, in
effect in the ten years after 1994, was wholly ineffectual. A Department of
Justice-backed study concluded, “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun
violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable
measurement.” (Rifles of all types, let alone assault rifles, are used in gun
homicides only rarely.)
The proposal to keep people on the terrorist watch list
from buying guns sounds sensible, yet it is problematic in that it denies
people an explicit constitutional right on the basis of little or no due
process. Last year, the Times itself
inveighed against “the shadowy, self-contradictory world of American terror
watch lists.” If the watch list is to become a no-gun list, it has to be
cleaned up, and listees should have an opportunity to challenge their status upon
attempting to buy a gun.
Such a prohibition would affect a tiny slice of gun
purchases and would likely be mere symbolism, like the assault-weapons ban. The
overriding reality that gun-controllers ignore is that almost all gun homicides
are committed with handguns in routine street crime, and are often obtained in
informal networks operating outside the gun rules we already have.
But please don’t confuse the anti-gun campaigners with
facts. Their ignorance is invincible, and necessary to their crusade.
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