When you look at any list of legislative priorities from anti-gun organizations, you’re going to see an assault weapon ban right up there at the top. This is their number one priority, the thing they want more than any other.
Even statewide organizations in states that already have some kind of ban will probably have something that calls for expanding it in some way. It’s never enough for them. They want to ban so-called assault weapons with a vehemence that is, frankly, a little disturbing.
In Minnesota, this debate is raging following the shooting in Minneapolis, but it’s not confined to either that state or even within the bounds of sanity.
Walz’s mania is just a symptom of a more serious issue: Banamania, the fixation of Democratic politicians and gun-grabbers, in general, on a type of law that has never been shown to have any impact at all. Like the riskiest of the patent nostrums hawked by the old traveling medicine shows, the best you could hope for is it won’t make things worse.
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask banamaniacs how they imagine a ban would prevent anything? It wouldn’t even ban the guns. The cost of an Australian-style buyback would be prohibitive.
Last January, the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated 30.7 million rifles like the AR-15 had been manufactured since 1990. The vast majority are still in circulation and it’s likely a large percentage of them are owned by American civilians. Pass a ban and every one of them will be right where it was before the ban. All that would be prohibited would be sales of new guns to private citizens and a rush to buy existing inventory prior to a ban becoming effective would add significantly to the supply.
S. 1531, the latest version of the federal assault weapons ban, has a new twist: 90 days after the law goes into effect, the existing guns would no longer be transferable to anyone without an FFL. Gosh, sounds ominous, but who’s going to know? A federal registry of guns and gun owners has been prohibited since May 19, 1986, when the Firearm Owners Protection Act became effective. A few states have or have tried to create their own registries of certain types of firearms. They have encountered “difficulties.” New York tried in 2013 and the most optimistic noncompliance rate was 82 percent.
Contrary to former President Joe Biden’s senile maunderings, the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban was not a success. It had a negligible impact on crime or the use of rifles in murders, a negative impact on mass shootings, and produced no benefit whatsoever to public safety.
In spite of the hype and hysteria, fewer than 100 of these guns have been used in mass shootings and that figure includes the 22 stockpiled by the Las Vegas killer, multiple rifles used in the Inland Regional Center and Rancho Tehama incidents and even guns shooters brought with them and didn’t use.
Handguns are actually the most common firearm used in mass shootings, including those that also involved so-called assault weapons, and that’s even more stark if you use a mass shooting definition akin to the Gun Violence Archive’s, which tallies gang gunfights as mass shootings also. Those guys are almost exclusively using handguns.
Ammoland’s Bill Cawthon talks about the “mythology” that is spread about these weapons, including a lawyer claiming the police waited outside of Uvalde not because of their own cowardice, but because they were understandably fearful of the destructive power of the AR-15 rifle.
Never mind that they had body armor and similar weapons. No, they were just afraid because the firearm was way too deadly.
Where does this all come from? Why is there this repeated attempt to attack a weapon that’s rarely used in criminal activities, even mass murders?
The answer is simple: It scares them.
For some, it’s just a scary-looking gun, and they’re uncomfortable with the idea that their neighbors can have such a firearm. Then they latch onto every incident involving one as proof that their fear was well-placed.
For others, they recognize that private ownership of such weapons will ultimately become an impediment to their eventual plans for gun control. If we have the means to meet threats from our government on something approaching equal footing, our numbers will likely overwhelm a gun-control-focused, tyrannical government. They recognize that in order to take everything, they have to start here.
It’s not about public safety, and part of that is clear in how often assault weapon bans are proposed in response to incidents where one wasn’t involved in any way, shape, or form.
They hate them because these so-called assault weapons represent the fact that we have the right to keep and bear arms and that we’re willing to exercise it in ways that have nothing to do with outdoor activities like hunting. It’s a big middle finger toward their desires to marginalize us and disarm us.
And while they’re free to hate them, they might as well learn to live with their hate, because we’re not letting them go anywhere.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners, so-called assault weapons, and the Second Amendment.
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