By Robert VerBruggen
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Joe Biden’s gun-control plans have about zero chance of
getting through Congress, especially if Republicans win at least one of the
Georgia runoffs. That’s good, because his bright idea for restricting “assault
weapons” would force America’s gun owners to choose between (a) giving up
millions of their firearms and magazines to a federal “buyback” and (b)
registering those guns with the federal government, paying billions of dollars
in taxes for the privilege.
Any guesses as to how that would play out in this
country?
As many readers may be old enough to remember, America
had a ban on assault weapons for ten years, from 1994 to 2004, and it didn’t
start a civil war. That’s because the folks who drafted that law were smarter
than whoever is handling gun policy for Biden. The law applied mainly to businesses:
It became illegal to sell brand-new semiautomatic guns with certain
combinations of tactical features (think folding stocks, flash suppressors,
etc.), as well as new magazines that held more than ten rounds at a time.
Individual Americans who’d previously purchased the banned items were left
alone, and they were even allowed to sell the items on the secondary market.
This isn’t to defend the law. I don’t
think it reduced crime, in large part because rifles are not often used in
crime to begin with, and also because “assault weapons,” despite some
military-style features, do not differ from semiautomatic hunting rifles in
their caliber or rate of fire. And I do think the ban violated the
Second Amendment, for the reasons David French ably
laid out in 2018.
But for all its flaws, the 1994 law didn’t tell ordinary
gun owners that they had to either turn their assault weapons and magazines
over to the feds or register them and pay a $200-per-item tax, as Biden has
endorsed to go along with a new ban. As explained on his website, which in turn cites a policy
memo from the Giffords Law Center, Biden wants to regulate these items
under the National Firearms Act (NFA), the law that currently applies to, among
other things, fully automatic machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and sound
suppressors.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation reports
that Americans now own 20 million “modern sporting rifles” — the industry’s
competing euphemism for “assault weapons” — and more than 150 million magazines
capable of holding more than ten rounds. (Specifically, the group tallies about
70 million handgun magazines holding more than ten rounds, plus about 80
million rifle magazines holding 30 or more, so that doesn’t even include rifle
magazines holding between ten and 30 rounds.) The former category accounts for
about half of all rifles produced in and imported to the U.S. And the latter,
while sometimes called “high-capacity” magazines, are actually standard
capacity for many modern guns, so they’re simply everywhere.
As Stephen Gutowski of the Washington Free Beacon points
out, if America’s gun owners actually identified themselves and paid the
required taxes, it would cost them billions. The rifles alone would add up to
$4 billion in taxes, and if magazines were treated as NFA items too, that would
be another $30 billion. A person whose gun collection I know intimately, who
requested anonymity, and who totally isn’t me, would be out a thousand
bucks just over his magazines.
But that wouldn’t happen. The federal government would
get neither the guns nor the money nor the personal information of every
assault-weapon owner. It would only get to choose between ignoring widespread
resistance and going out hunting for civilians who’d kept unregistered guns,
hoping not to end up with another Waco or Ruby Ridge.
Think I’m being melodramatic? Take a quick tour through
some recent gun-control efforts that required enforcing the law against
everyday civilians, and not just businesses that traffic in firearms.
In 2013, Connecticut tried to force the registration of
assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The government estimated there
were almost 400,000 of the former and 2 million of the latter in the state, but
the following year, the number
of registrations totaled only about 50,000 and 40,000 respectively.
Laws requiring background checks on private sales of used
guns have fared little better. One study looked
at laws in Washington State, Colorado, and Delaware, and found that in the
first two of those states, the background-check law didn’t even increase background
checks. The study also chronicled the forthright resistance the laws faced:
In Washington, there was a
well-documented public “I will not comply” rally at the state capital, at which
firearms were openly transferred between private parties without background
checks. There were also gun shows where non-compliance was encouraged and
public calls from profirearm organisations to not comply with the state’s new
CBC [comprehensive-background-check] policy. . . .
Many county law enforcement
officials in Colorado reportedly stated they would not enforce its CBC law, and
some retailers were declining to process background checks for private party
transfers. Washington law enforcement agencies announced there would be no
arrests for selling guns at the non-compliance rally and gun show. Preliminary
data from a study of two Eastern states suggest that willingness to prosecute
violations of such laws can vary substantially.
Meanwhile, in my own state of Virginia, the threat of a Democrat-controlled
state government recently prompted many counties and localities to declare
themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” where local authorities would not
take part in enforcing any unconstitutional gun laws.
You can think whatever you want about the folks who defy
the law. Heck, I’m squishy
on universal background checks myself, though I’d have to check with the
liberal wife of my anonymous friend to see how open she’d be to him illegally
keeping his magazines.
But the undeniable fact is that American gun owners are
not going to register their weapons, and they’re not going to surrender them,
either. The only real questions are the extent to which the defiance would be
quiet versus brazen, and how severely Democrats would pay the price at the
ballot box. The anti-gun Left should stop pretending this could play out any
other way.
No comments:
Post a Comment