National
Review Online
Wednesday,
January 25, 2023
In response
to the news that there had been two mass shootings in the state of California
in the space of only 48 hours, President Joe Biden did Tuesday morning what he
often does when faced with a complex societal problem: He talked confidently
about something else. In a hastily released statement on
the topic, Biden
urged “both chambers of Congress to act quickly” and send an “Assault Weapons
Ban to my desk.” Tragedy, meet non sequitur.
The
notion that the ambitions of nihilist mass murderers are likely to be
meaningfully constrained by arbitrary limitations on the way that certain legally
available firearms look is fanciful and
unsubstantiated at
the best of times. Here, though, the claim does not even intersect with
the incidents on which Biden has predicated his call. California already has
all of the gun-control laws that the Democrats wish to add federally —
including a strict ban on so-called “assault weapons” — and those laws made no
difference whatsoever. And how could they have, given that in neither case did
the gunman use one of the commonly owned
rifles that
Biden’s coveted “assault weapons” bans typically target; instead, they used a
couple of standard semi-automatic handguns.
Because
the term “assault weapon” doesn’t mean anything useful — and because those who
decide what counts as an “assault weapon” care more about aesthetics than
functionality — one of those standard semi-automatic handguns happened to be
banned under California law simply because it resembled a weapon that
also comes in automatic form. But it wasn’t an automatic weapon — and, indeed,
it had no features that made it more or less lethal than any other
semi-automatic handgun that remains legally available in the state. If
President Biden’s definition of “assault weapon” now includes 85 percent of all handguns manufactured
in the United States, he ought to say so explicitly.
Jumping
on the bandwagon, Dianne Feinstein echoed Biden’s call by insisting that “we
were tragically reminded this weekend of the deadly nature of assault weapons.”
But, of course, we were reminded of no such thing. Rather, we were reminded
that it does not take sophisticated weaponry to inflict a great deal of damage
on innocent people. One can do it with a car, or a bomb, or, as in the two
California attacks, the sort of quotidian firearms that are typically ignored
by the gun-control movement. The mechanisms inside the semi-automatic handguns
that were used in California have been legal in the United States since the
administration of Grover Cleveland — that is, before the invention of
penicillin, fixed-wing aircraft, and recorded video. Under a plain reading of
the Second Amendment, those mechanisms are presumptively protected by the
Constitution, but, even if they were not, they would likely remain legal in all
50 states. Asked last year by Gallup whether they favored restricting the
possession of handguns to the police, nearly three quarters of the American public said
that they did not.
There is
no obvious answer to the problem of mass public shootings, and, by implying
otherwise, President Biden is doing a profound disservice to the voters he
serves. Leaving aside the constitutional and political problems
that such a move would present, it remains the case that there is no clear
statistical link between
the prohibition of so-called “assault weapons” and the rate of mass shootings —
let alone the three-fold decrease that Biden has promised. By cynically expanding the
definition of “assault weapon” to cover nearly every new handgun that is sold
in the United States, Biden has taken what was already a false promise and
turned it into an epicene fantasy. We have a word for that sort of behavior,
but it’s not “leadership.”
No comments:
Post a Comment