By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, June 02, 2022
The Democrats dream of banning particular kinds of
firearms, from the descendants of Eugene Stoner’s AR-15 to the common 9mm
handgun.
This is not going to happen.
The question has, in fact, already been litigated all the
way to the Supreme Court, which in its Heller decision
considered the issue of firearms that “are commonly possessed by law-abiding
citizens for lawful purposes today” and held that any “categorical ban of such
weapons violates the Second Amendment.” The AR-style modern sporting rifle and
the 9mm handgun are two of the firearms most “commonly possessed by law-abiding
citizens for lawful purposes today,” and a ban on either weapon would be
unconstitutional.
There are many people who believe that the Second
Amendment is outmoded, a relic of 18th-century thinking, and there is a
reasonable, good-faith argument for that position, though it is not one that I
find ultimately persuasive. But the Second Amendment is still there,
irrespective of whether President Biden or Nancy Pelosi thinks it should be. We
have a process for amending the Constitution, and we have repealed amendments
in the past. Yes, it would be politically difficult to repeal the Second
Amendment — we created the Bill of Rights to make it difficult to remove legal
protections for Americans’ civil rights.
As I have argued before, the Democrats’ position
vis-à-vis firearms is not a matter of ballistics but one of aesthetics. There
isn’t anything especially dangerous about the 5.56mm semi-automatic rifles that
give suburban progressives the willies. They fire a round that is less powerful
than that of a typical deer rifle, and they have the same rate of fire — one
round for one pull of the trigger — as a revolver and most other common
firearms. They can be fitted with magazines that hold 30 rounds — or 50 rounds,
or 100 rounds — but that is true of any firearm with a detachable box magazine,
which is a feature of the great majority of modern rifles and handguns. You can
tell that this is a matter of aesthetics from the fact that the old 1990s ban
on so-called assault weapons took a largely aesthetic approach — among other
things, it put firearms on the naughty list merely for having a lug on which to
mount a bayonet. The 1990s were pretty wild, but there weren’t a lot of bayonet
murders. Folding stocks and bayonet lugs didn’t have any practical effect on
crime in the 1990s; they just offended some refined progressive sensibilities.
President Biden fixates on the 9mm handgun, and he also
says that all you need to defend yourself and your family is a shotgun. A
shotgun is very effective for that purpose, because a single shot from a
12-gauge shotgun loaded with 00 (“double aught”) buckshot inflicts damage
equivalent to being shot nine times with a 9mm handgun.
President Biden’s position is, in short, “You shouldn’t have that dangerous
weapon, because it is dangerous, and instead, you should have this much more
dangerous weapon.” It is incoherent, but Joe Biden has always been incoherent —
this is not exclusively an effect of his senescence.
Bans on this or that common firearm are nonstarters
politically and dead-on-arrival constitutionally. They shouldn’t really even be
part of the conversation.
What is on the table are “time and place” regulations,
which are a good deal less controversial and which can — and should — be
managed at the local level. The Second Amendment protects a fundamental right
to keep and bear arms, and that fundamental right belongs to every American
irrespective of his place of residence. But we federalists appreciate that even
the fundamental rights may be implemented with some variation among and within
the states. There isn’t any reason that the local gun regulations in Manhattan
have to be identical to those in Brewster County, Texas, or Niobrara County,
Wyo. The same principle under which we exclude carrying firearms onto
commercial flights might as easily apply to city subways, nightlife districts
such as the French Quarter or Sixth Street, etc. Indeed, even in gun-friendly
states such as Texas, there are many places where a firearm may not be carried,
some of them determined by legislation and some of them privately determined
under Texas’s firearms-trespass law, which has the fortuitous statutory
designation of Section 30.06 (“thirty aught six”).
There may be room for prudent changes to time-and-place
restrictions, but these are not going to have much effect on either ordinary
violent crime or homicidal spectaculars such as the ones recently carried out
in Buffalo and Uvalde. We have lots of ordinary gun crime, much of it related
to gangs and the drug trade, because we do a poor job of isolating the serious
violent criminals in our penal system — the average murderer in the United
States has at least five prior arrests and one conviction before he gets
brought in for homicide — and because we routinely refuse to enforce the gun
laws we already have on the books. If you get arrested carrying a gun illegally
in one of the crime-ridden neighborhoods of Philadelphia or Baltimore, you have
an excellent chance of walking away from the case scot-free, and a pretty good
chance of avoiding jail in the statistically unlikely event that you are
convicted.
Horrifying events such as the massacre in Uvalde are much
rarer, and much more difficult to police and prevent. One thing that is important
to understand about these killings is that they are expressive violence;
because that is the case, in almost every one of these situations there are
indicators that the perpetrator might carry out mass violence before he
actually does, including in many instances an open declaration of intent to do
so. Unlike the more common kinds of murderers, these killers often have no
criminal records, and we never have the chance to use the tools of the
criminal-justice system to keep them off the streets or to keep guns out of
their hands. We have instead the much less robust tools of the
mental-health-care and public-education systems.
There are institutional failures across the board: in the
criminal-justice system, in the schools, in mental health care, in communities,
and, most consequentially, in the family. It is delusional to believe that we
are going to solve those problems by enacting new retail regulations on
sporting-goods stores.
But then, delusion is very much in fashion right now.
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