Last night, the president made some remarks during a DCCC fundraiser at a private residence in San Francisco, California. One thing he said is curious because it appears to be wrong, and deliberately so.
Now, over the next couple of months, we’ve got a couple of issues: gun control. (Applause.) I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon — by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.
Adam Lanza did not have a fully automatic weapon, so it is unclear why the president said that he did. The error not only failed to advance his case for controlling semiautomatic weapons, it undermined his case. It also made him sound unknowledgeable about guns, a liability that was quickly exploited by the right.
I don’t know why he made that statement, but it got me thinking. Would the outcome in Newtown have been all that different if Lanza had used a fully automatic weapon? I suspect that he may have killed a few more kids who actually managed to escape while he was reloading, but I don’t know that for certain. Isn’t the problem with semiautomatic weapons that they are enough like fully automatic weapons that the distinction doesn’t really matter outside of the battlefield?
Probably the hardest thing to explain is why a semiautomatic pistol or hunting rifle is okay, but not a semiautomatic “assault weapon.” The best argument I can make is that the only legitimate use of a semiautomatic military-style rifle is to kill a lot of people. The handguns are suitable for self-defense in the home. The hunting rifles are excellent for bringing down game, and aren’t typically used like an assault weapon. A hunter might pull the trigger two or three times, but there’s no reason to empty your clip into a deer or elk or whatever you’re hunting. The AR-15 type guns, however, are not ideal for hunting even if they can be used that way.
Now, if we ban these military style semiautomatic rifles, someone like Adam Lanza could do the same amount of damage with a semiautomatic hunting rifle, so what have we accomplished? I have two answers to that. The first is that the ammunition magazine part of this is important, too. We don’t want guns to be adapted to take these huge magazines, and we don’t want the magazines to be readily available. But the second part is that it is a cultural thing. It’s hard to quantify since it’s basically an aesthetic argument. But I believe that the mere existence of these military style weapons is corrosive and encourages their use on people in a way that hunting rifles simply don’t. Just as it is odd to take your AR-15 Bushmaster deer hunting, it is strange to take your hunting rifle to your local mall for a shooting spree. Banning the assault weapon is basically nothing more than a cultural statement that these killing machines are obscene.
A lot of people disagree with that judgment. A lot of people really love playing G.I. Joe. Their opinions are important. But, ultimately, as Colorado, Connecticut, and New York have already concluded, their opinions are not decisive. The truth is that when it comes to our citizenry, there is no real difference between a semiautomatic and fully automatic rifle in terms of their lethality. No rifle designed to kill people should be semiautomatic. If you want to protect your home, get a handgun or a shotgun, or both. Or just use your hunting rifle.
He made a lot of dumb comments at that fundraiser. Including sexist and demeaning ones:
Shakesville:
“You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general in the country. It’s true! C’mon.”
I don’t find the comment sexist – if he said she was a good looking woman, yes. but he said she was the best looking AG – that qualifies as a joke imo.
I have a relative who is also a female AG so I am deeply offended!! Kidding, I don’t think anyone really cares and I’m pretty sure Ms. Harris is better looking than all the male AGs too!
Re-read it. He qualified it with, “You have to be careful…” You know, all those PC extremists hiding around the bushes waiting to pounce on everything you say!
Apparently, the community at Shakesville agrees, with commenter JarredH:
“I mean, does he actually find Harris’s accomplishments and qualifications for her job actually praiseworthy, or is he just bringing them up as a smokescreen for sexism?”
This isn’t the first time with him, either. He has a history of making demeaning and sexist comments, not to mention the reporting that many women found it hard to work in his WH.
BTW, I’m not saying the president is a sexist, or hates women, or w/e. I am saying that he seems to have a lack of awareness when he discusses things like this, and it has permeated throughout the WH environment. I was glad that he had dinner with the women to discuss their concerns; listening is an important step. But he still has a long way to go, and coddling it as a “joke” only allows the patriarchy to continue to hold on.
Are you relying on Suskind’s book as your source?
Partially, but not wholly:
The White House Boys’ Club
You can even see it in the picture of the dinner; they looked pissed.
Ok, but if you follow the back and forth between Suskind and Dunn–her point was that there was a problem but that the President acted to control and improve the situation. You can read the back and forth between them.
That picture doesn’t mean they are pissed with him. They could very well be pissed with male co-workers and he could very well have been an ally in making changes (which is what Dunn said).
Well, I disagree with your conclusion. The most dangerous weapon is the handgun, revolvers included. They are the instrument of almost all gun violence. If you want to attack the problem, that’s where it is.
Rifles are used in a relatively tiny number of high profile shootings. But it’s not about magazine capacity. Certainly suicide and accidents – the most common way of people dying from a gunshot – would not be affected by any restriction on magazine size. And in crimes involving a pistol being fired, the average number of shots fired was between 3 and 4. Only 3-4% of all shootings involved more than 10 shots.
Assuming the study which reached those conclusions is largely correct (and I have no reason to doubt it), then all this talk about magazine capacity is misguided, at best.
I don’t know why the President stated the Newtown facts incorrectly. If it was deliberate, then the only reason I can think of is to mislead people. Obama is not that manipulative a guy, so I doubt it was deliberate.
Ah, what percent of mass killings do you think “involved more than 10 shots”? All of them?
Yes, indeed, the nation’s mass killings are “only 3-4% of all shootings”, so they’re not worth worrying about!
Great conclusions from the study…
I didn’t say that “they’re not worth worrying about”, but I think it’s reasonable to conclude (a) magazine size restrictions would have no effect at all on 96% of killings and (b) we simply don’t know much about how strongly the number of shots fired correlates with the number of deaths and injuries in the remaining 4%. It makes intuitive sense that, say, confiscating all magazines greater than 10 rounds would result in fewer deaths in those 4% of cases, so on that level if it were feasible it would fall into the category of “let’s try it and see if it works.” But it’s not feasible to confiscate them and the ones that are out there are really durable.
I’m trying to be reality-based here, so why the invective?
You’re saying that capacity should have no place in any proposed legislation because it “only” involves 4% of cases (but likely 100% of mass killing cases). This is, quite frankly, saying “it’s not worth worrying about”. Which also happens to be the same conclusion of those who want to do nothing about the oceans of weapons.
I think this being deliberately obtuse, and not “reality-based”.
In the past 7 years, 900 people have been killed in mass shootings, defined as killing 4 or more people in one place (other than the shooter). Based on that statistic, it’s not clear that your assertion that 100% of mass shootings involve high-capacity magazines is even correct.
By contrast, in 2005 alone, the total number of shooting deaths was over 30,000. The number of accidental deaths alone that year was 789.
So, you’re proposing we devote a huge amount of political energy into a solution that’s aimed at less than half a percent of all gun deaths? When it’s not clear that even the strongest form of the proposed solution (confiscating magazines greater than 10 rounds) would have a material effect on the number of deaths in that half a percent? And when implementing that solution poses seemingly insurmountable practical difficulties (in identifying who owns such magazines, creating an enforcement mechanism, and then paying the former owners compensation for the confiscated property)?
Come on. Let’s do something that (a) will work and (b) we can accomplish, like universal background checks and registration.
Seems to me you’re letting the perfect veto the good. Personally I’d like to see enormously more restrictive gun laws. You’re ignoring Boo’s excellent point that this issue has a cultural/esthetic component. Maybe you start with the most obscene instances (like AK-47s) to break this idea that any kind of killing machine is OK because of a bogus spin on the Constitution. It took banning DDT to reset the public perception that other, even more toxic, chemicals could be banned by the government.This is how you fight the kind of robo-thought that the NRA has been injecting for decades.
I don’t believe your statistics. Kids being shot on their front steps or through a window are not being specifically targeted in urban drivebys. They are part of the general spray of bullets from repeating weapons. The numbers are useless without reflecting various environments. “Crimes involving a pistol” does not necessarily refer to murders. How many armed robberies, domestic scare tactics, etc. go into the average? On a strictly rationalist basis, you have an argument. In the real world, we’re dealing with the same mindset that goes hysterical over a plane crash but totally ignores the thousands more deaths by car. I say, use the most sickening events as illustrations of what gun-love culture produces.
My only objection to Boo’s insightful post is ” A lot of people really love playing G.I. Joe. Their opinions are important.” No, they’re not. Any more than a guy who loves to burn tires in his backyard has an important opinion on the effects of rubber-smoke on lungs.
The way I see it, if you stick a 100 round magazine on a semi-automatic weapon, then the fact that is semi-automatic and not fully automatic really does not matter a whole hell of a lot. The lethality comes from the caliber of the ammo and how much ordinance you can unleash in a given period of time without having to stop and reload. Even with an automatic weapon, you would have to reload at some point. And that would always be the point where it is most likely that a shooter could be stopped.
In my mind, the magazine size is what makes the biggest difference.
It is very easy to modify a semi-automatic weapon such that it functions as a fully automatic weapon. My understanding is that this is exactly what was done in the case to which the President was referring.
And I agree with David in Philly, that all this focus on stopping the mass shooters simply overshadows the fact that the few thousand who have died from gun violence since Newtown have not died in mass shootings, they have died from primarily handgun violence. All this focus on the characteristics revolving around mass shootings simply ignores the real violence that is going on every single day.
Among the political class, I think it’s deliberate misdirection. Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban is a perfect example. Passing it would make very little difference on the level of gun violence, and the principals on both sides know it. It’s something they can fundraise on and it gives the media something to talk about. Meanwhile, the much more intractable problem of handguns can be safely ignored.
What’s your proposal on addressing the “intractable problem of handguns” in Insane Gun Nation?
Build political support for banning new ones and confiscating existing ones. It would be an expensive multi-generational project with uncertain odds of success. but it’s the only effective means that I see.
I also think that the experience in places like Australia mean that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel on this. We have good data over more than 10 years on what works.
Also, if you stop production of the AR-15 type weapons the prices for existing weapons will go up. Combine higher prices with background checks for secondary sales and a generous buy-back program and we will see some significant reductions.
I don’t think Australia’s experience can be directly translated to the U.S. Pro-gun people were much fewer than in the United States and didn’t have a political home in any major party before the Prime Minister proposed confiscation. Cultural support for gun ownership is comparatively much lower. I think you have to de-fetishize gun ownership in the U.S. before we’d have a chance of passing the kind of legislation confiscation would require. That’s why I think it’s a multi-generational project.
“if you stop production of the AR-15 type weapons the prices for existing weapons will go up.”
Undoubtedly. A fully automatic submachinegun like an UZI today costs at least 10 times what it did before the ban on the sale of new ones went into place. An AK-47 costs over $20,000 today. If we added all semi-automatic rifles to the National Firearms Act, then it would put us on a glidepath to limiting ownership of such weapons to a handful of wealthy people in 20 years. It would have been a very savvy move if that had been the proposal after Newtown, although passage would have been very uncertain and the implementation costs would be massive.
I was referring to the efficacy of policies, not public opinion or political will.
I guess I’ll point out an obvious point about hunters. The guys I interact with regularly don’t have the slightest desire to use anything but a rifle or a bow because if they are going to drag their assess up to the top of my hills to kill a deer, they are looking to preserve as much of the meat as possible. It’s damn hard work making a kill shot and then getting the deer off the mountains.
That fact also makes an interesting point about what someone with a semi or full automatic is trying to achieve against his/her target(s).
These semi-automatic rifles are useless for home defense as well.
Lanza seemed to have great control shooting each child exactly twice. In that case it would have made no difference. If he had lost control and fired up all his ammo quickly, he might have killed fewer persons. Anyway, it’s big magazines and at least semiautomatic ease of shooting that applied in this case.
??? Some of the precious children were riddled with bullets–not shot exactly twice. I don’t know where you got this information. He shot 151 rounds in less than 5 minutes.
I thought every provision relating to restricting sales of “types” of weapons in Insane Gun Nation had already been stripped out of the senate bill? (Of course, there is no House bill, right?) Since the hapless gun bill has already been reduced to a pathetic attempt to inject some sanity into background checks (which also appears headed for filibuster failure), who cares about the sacred automatic vs semi-automatic distinction at this point? The gun nuts and their brownshirted NRA won, what a surprise.
The total collapse of this gun legislation in the face of strong (but wholly irrelevant) public opinion is yet more incontrovertible evidence of the paralysis and collapse of any functioning national gub’mint. One might think that more than few thousand people who follow political blogs would be a tad bit worried about this obvious fact. Doesn’t seem to have registered with too many fine Americans, however.
That Obama is out there even talking about weapon types in the face of this appalling legislative failure makes me wonder what reports he has been reading. Sounds kind of out of touch to me.
It’s all just semantics, and a chance to pick the President’s words apart.
Besides, I wonder if the real issue is why so many people think they are going to have a “Make my day, PUNK!” moment, and why they long so much for it?
I also wonder about the logic of saying the Constitution doesn’t say anything about hunting so it must not be important. Isn’t that what a good many people used their weapons for at the time it was written?
I really do get the concept of playing G.I. Joe, I play one sometimes myself in video games. What I don’t get is this: if you REALLY want to be G.I. Joe, why not just be a real one and join the military?
I guess they haven’t figured out the “G.I.” in “G.I. Joe” stands for “Government Issue”.
I agree with some of what you say here. Namely that for the purposes of a massacres, a semi-automatic weapon is about as useful as a fully automatic weapon. A fully automatic weapon is useful for suppression fire — for making an armed enemy keep his head down or face the inevitable consequences, which is why it seems reasonable for police to want them banned so that they don’t get into protracted gun fights with bank robbers or domestic violence perpetrators.
Murderers, however, will aim and shoot at each intended victim, so they don’t need fully automatic weapons. But so will people who need to defend themselves, such as a lone farm family in rural Wyoming who awakens to find a group of thieves emptying their barn of expensive equipment into a waiting truck. An AR-15 rifle would feel really handy to that farm family, even if they never use it for such an incident. It may provide a sense of security that allows them to live far from police protection and carry out their life’s work as farmers or other rural dwellers as they have always wanted to live.
But it is also true that an AR-15 rifle just looks really cool in a militaristic sort of way, and it creates its own market as such, especially for people who may be infatuated with the tools of violence, for whatever reason. As I said in a comment a while ago, I have an AR-15, and I love it. It’s my favorite gun, by far. Our family hosts regularly exchange teachers from France, usually women in their early 20’s, and it’s a hoot to take them out to shoot old refrigerators with the AR-15 up north (I don’t keep any guns in my home, as I mentioned before), so they can post Facebook videos for their friends back in Europe. It’s harmless fun. I would never give it up, even if banned, and neither would any AR-15 owner I’ve ever met, Democrat, Republican, or Socialist (I know one). It’s not a hunting rifle, and I don’t hunt. It’s a rifle for personal defense and for sport, like other sporting/rural survival tools you can find at Fleet Farm, such as Bowie knives, motorcycles, ATVs and snowmobiles, which kill more people than semi-automatic, military-style rifles do.
But when did interest in private ownership of AR-15s take off, because it is really something quite recent? It occurred in the 1990’s mostly, after the assault weapons ban called attention to such weapons, but more interestingly, after police and law enforcement agencies began arming themselves with such hardware in vast and visible quantities. Many gun nuts are wanna-be cops. And a lot of them are cops. There is a strong connection between the militarization of local police forces and enthusiasm for military style weapons, and as long as cops continue to play soldier, gun nuts will want to as well, legal or illegal. It’s just a fact of American life that we need to accept and deal with as it is. And as much as many might find gun nuts to be distasteful people with problematic political positions, almost none of them are murderers, so enacting and trying to implement policies that make their otherwise lawful activities illegal is asking for trouble with very little payoff in return.
Although I rhetorically support any efforts to deport Tea Party members, and I think the majority of gun nuts side with the Tea Party on things, when it comes to maintaining a right to keep and use military style weapons, I’m on the side of the gun nuts, un-apologetically. I think the way to reduce gun violence (or further reduce it since gun violence is already way down from its peak in the late 80’s and early 90’s) and to reduce infatuation with military-style weapons is to de-militarize local law enforcement agencies, not ban guns.
As long as SWAT teams and their tools are so prevalent in American police forces, gun nuts, many of whom are SWAT Team members in their own minds if not reality, will be trying to arm up to the levels seen in cop magazine ads. It makes more sense to me to broadly allow the public to have access to the same kinds of weapons that police have, but to focus on reducing police armaments and police militarism as a practical means of implementing a policy to reduce the circulation, and to further reduce the use, of the kinds of weapons that can cause mass murders in the wrong hands.
Why can’t we do both? On your previous comment you stated a need to limit police weapons just as much. I agree. In fact, if we didn’t have such widespread poverty and violent criminal behavior feeding off of it, I’d want police not to have guns whatsoever. Maybe a few shotguns and rifles, or certain pistols.
Get rid of the cops shiny toys, and your own.
The connection between poverty and criminal behavior is actually pretty weak, at least at the level of policy solutions. Crime in the US today is already WAY down. It is at the lowest levels in most of the country since 1970, and in many cases since 1960 when the FBI started compiling the data. Other individual state data (I’m familiar with Minnesota’s) show crime rates were lower in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s than today and today’s levels are about the same as the 1960’s. Poverty trends do not correlate well with these crime trends, generally. Crime was much lower before the War on Poverty of the 1960’s, and crime did not increase with the unemployment of the Great Recession. Something in current policy is already working.
I think we can do both, but the question is how. Like abortion, just banning guns won’t make them go away. It will just drive it underground, at best. I think a better approach would be a systematic, focused effort to de-militarize civilian law enforcement — to stop dressing cops up as paramilitary outfits. For starters, the uniforms and equipment. A police force can be just as effective if dressed in clothing and equipment that resembles something more like bicycle couriers or bicycle team members than in military-style gear like they are now. Authority doesn’t have to glamorize violence, and the glamorization of violence is most prevalent and acceptable in our society in the depiction of law enforcement.
I think lower gun sales to bad actors will follow if the cops stop playing soldier.
I think you’re failing to include the level of lead in the soil and air and water into your calculation. I’ve been pretty convinced for a while that this has been the source of the decrease. Control for that, especially comparable to poverty-stricken Banana Republics, and get back to me on how it’s not correlating.
As to your solutions for cops, sure. I can agree we can do that now; unnecessary for them to be like that, even in a place like LA or St. Louis. Eliminating the DEA and DHS is also high up on my list.
That’s interesting. So you think change lead poisoning is related to change in crime in the US? If that’s true, then we would need an explanation for changes in lead ingestion that correlate with the crime increase from the 1960’s to the late 1980’s and the steady crime decrease since that time. How do the Banana Republics fit in?
See this.
Based on the data I’ve read, not to mention that Kevin Drum cites, the drop in crime is not just associated with lead here in the US, it’s associated world-wide. And the more lead you had in a specific city, state, or county, you also notice crime correlates with it. Even before Drum’s article I was convinced of the lead hypothesis; I first heard of it in 2007.
“gun nuts to be distasteful people…almost none of them are murderers…”
Yes, until one develops mental problems over the course of his/her life, or has a family member who has/does. This is what is always ignored.
Your rationale for the rise of the problem is based on irrationality—that gun nuts want to emulate the fire power of police forces. Even if true, so what? Because they want to have the same firepower as police this make you conclude this is a valid desire and should be satisfied? And that gun nut “desires” should be an actual basis for public policy?
Don’t the gun nuts (do you include yourself in this category?) want to emulate the firepower of, say, the Marines or the Seals? Why not? How about just the National Guard? Why should gun nuts be denied the right to purchase whatever the Guard deploys, under your rationale?
Finally, if a law was proposed that banned everything but handguns for the nation’s police forces (whose armament is the sine qua non of your analysis), and allowed the public to have only the same weapons as police, would you support such legislation? No, according to your refrigerator shoot-up story. So it seems your whole argument is a trifle artificial.
I don’t propose banning what police would be armed with. I propose instead an effort to change policing philosophy to avoid militarization. Dress cops in functional athletic gear and equipment instead of paramilitary gear. Look for alternatives to SWAT tactics when arresting people. There is a high correlation between gun nuts and police officers, and an even higher one between gun nuts and police academy rejects. We know this by just following the marketing in police-interest media.
Rather than focusing on bans and punitive actions, collective action is often more effective by exercising “soft” power. Cops are emulating the military and that’s the why gun nuts are too. And cops are easier to control than your neighbors are, so focus on demilitarizing police, not on banning what individuals are doing today mostly (though sadly not entirely) in an increasingly harmless, lawful way as it is.
Here’s a problem with your comment.
As I noted, a semiautomatic hunting rifle is just as lethal as a AR-15. Your Wyoming famers can use their hunting rifle just as effectively to protect their barn. You can use that argument to say that banning assault rifles is pointless, but you can also use it to say that they are never necessary.
I don’t think it’s actually correct that a semi-automatic hunting rifle is just as lethal or useful for self defense as an AR-15, but I agree that they are both quite lethal and can be used almost as effectively for most situations, which is usually just a psychological one that you have a good weapon hidden away in a locker if you need it.
But my argument against the current anti-gun push is that banning guns, like banning abortion, is something that causes more harm than good even if there are moral reasons for doing it. It will cause more harm than good because people like me, who are otherwise quite reasonable law-abiders, just won’t cooperate, and there are lots of us. We won’t cooperate because we are doing nothing wrong and don’t believe we need to change and will be really pissed off about it. So the problem with gun control is not a moral, normative one of doing the right thing, such as making a point that military fetishism of weapons is obscene, as you said. It is a pragmatic one of how to implement such a policy.
The last time assault weapons bans were attempted in the 1990’s, sales of military style weapons, and their use in murders, skyrocketed — going from essentially nothing to what appears to be a few hundred per year (compared to tens of thousands of handguns that still kill every year). Not only that, but the government blundered an attempt to enforce the law by killing a lot of people in an unnecessarily militarized standoff at Waco Texas, thus politicizing the issue further and engendering more conflict (the opposite of cooperation).
Following Waco, Oklahoma City occurred, so my argument is that banning such weapons will actually lead to more deaths than alternative policies — especially since murders with such weapons are so few. And when the assault weapons ban expired, gun violence, which had been trending down for years, still continued to decline, so the ban was useless at best, and indirectly killed a bunch of innocent people at worst.
If symbolic politics against obscene implements of violence is a good goal in itself, than put the focus on the source of military weapon -fetishism — the over-militarized police. Follow the marketing the gun makers do — it’s all in cop and cop-wanna-be media. So de-militarize the cops, and you might see a bigger reduction in gun violence than is already occurring under current policy.
your chronology is way off.
Waco siege: February 28, 1993-April 19, 1993.
Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (signed): November 30, 1993.
Federal Assault Weapons Ban (signed): September 13, 1994.
Oklahoma City bombing: April 19, 1995.
Obviously the OKC bombing was inspired by Waco, which is why it happened on the 2nd anniversary. But the Branch Davidians were not reacting to the Assault Weapons Ban or the Handgun regulation.
Missed one. In 1986, machine guns were banned (I know, that late?). That law that had almost universal support, including from the NRA.
The Branch Davidians weren’t reacting to anything — they were just going about their lives, as weird as their lives apparently were to many of the rest of us, which included owning and playing with the now banned fully automatic weapons. They were not killing anyone with them or using them in harmful ways. (And yes, I do support the machine gun ban.)
The law that was being enforced in Waco was the machine gun ban, but it proved tragically hard to implement in Waco, because, well, surprise, government isn’t always smart — even that much more reasonable ban led to needless deaths and tragedy without actually reducing the number of people killed by machine guns, which has been consistently close to zero even in America. So imagine what a much more widespread ban on semi-automatic weapons would lead to. That’s the problem with symbolic legislation — it usually causes more harm than good.
If we proved so tragically inept in enforcing the 1986 machine gun ban, I really don’t think we should trust ourselves with a much more ambitious project, especially since the 1994 ban on “assault” weapons proved to exacerbate the circulation of such weapons instead of reducing it.
There are better ways to reduce gun violence and weapons fetishism than punitive bans which lead to armed interventions in people’s otherwise lawful lives.
I can’t even count all the contradictions. Have we engaged in “symbolic legislation” or “tragic enforcement” with gun laws? Was the Assault Weapons Ban “symbolic”? It “exacerbated” circulation but did not “reduce” it? We proved “tragically inept” at enforcing the machine gun ban because of one incident? Did we give up enforcing the machine gun ban after Waco? Was that ban repealed? Has it been effective?
It’s all a problem of “gun-fetishism”, you say. And now gun legislation (in addition to militarized police forces) exacerbates it. Just let the guns alone, and there won’t be a problem. Don’t have government draw attention to the gun. Let the Free Market operate! Except for machine guns, those make sense to ban. What’s the policy distinction again? Police can’t have machine guns so the Branch Davidians didn’t want them?
So no actual legislation or bans, not even relating to police weapons. Change their uniforms and make them ride bikes. And no SWAT tactics, whatever they are. That will reduce gun nut fetishism and mass killings with these weapons. Forgive me if I find this all just a lot of clever special pleading by someone who likes to own high power weaponry and doesn’t want to change or they’ll get “pissed off”.
I also have to wonder as you tell us about the gun fetishism of “gun nuts”, how would society be able to reduce YOUR gun fetishism? Or do you deny that you have the condition?
I’m not a gun nut. As I’ve mentioned in previous comments as while ago, it was my sport in college and I own some firearms now, including an AR-15, although I don’t shoot very much anymore.
Yes, the assault weapons ban was symbolic. Symbolic policy implementation means, in the literature of the public administration field, policies that are implemented for the purpose of looking like government is doing something although no positive outcomes are likely or often even expected. It occurs when opposition to a policy is high, as are the costs, social and/or economic, of implementing the policy relative to available resources. It means government is content to say their doing something about a problem some have managed to get on the agenda without actually doing anything about it.
“Assault weapons,” notwithstanding the recent school and movie theater massacres, really don’t hurt very many people at all. Handguns do almost all the killing. Hands, fists and feet kill more people every year than rifles of all kinds do, so assault weapons are even smaller than that. Expending all kinds of political capital and, later, enforcement resources on something that really won’t make the gun violence problem any better is exactly what policy scholars mean by the term “symbolic.” It’s bad government, and I don’t support it, especially when it harms my interests.
Well put. I share your frustration. But people are so outraged by Newtown and other shocking mass killings that they’re willing to pursue counter-productive symbolic actions because they’re willing to try anything at this point. And they don’t want to hear that they don’t understand the facts. It’s sort of like dealing with supporters of the Iraq war who were so shocked by 9/11 that they were willing to support any response that the Bush administration proposed. It’s understandable and unfortunate.
He stopped shooting because his gun jammed. Large mags and fast firing are the number one cause of gun jams. As a former military service member and member of the VFW, arguing over magazine sizes and automatics is so utterly stupid it makes the NRA seem sane and in control. This is also why gun control always fails. Because it’s supporters are so ignorant of the actual facts they can’t be taken seriously. They sound more nuts that Wayne La Pierre and they can’t stop ranting about stuff they know nothing about.
Also “assault” rifle is a purely cosmetic term. Plenty of guns are semi automatic and fire .223 ammo… and .223 is not the same as the actual 5.56 nato cart I used with the real deal m4. You can fire a .223 in a rifle made for 5.56 but do it the other way and your probably going to break the rifle and hurt yourself. The AR-15 is popular because it looks cool and badass… also there are a rack ton of .223’s that don’t look like the AR-15 that are utterly unaffected by any sort of regulation, you just can’t bling them out the same way.
Now, for civilians the point of a semi .223 is to kill… varmints. The round is rather weak, and to kill say a cyote shooting a bunch of them quickly is the name of the game. All bullets are lethal but in the military if you want to kill someone, well, the .223 is a joke. We use the 5.56 for logistics, not because of it’s lethality. Which is why battle rifles and other more lethal weapons use a much stronger cartridge. To go further, most hand gun killings are done with .22lr, because it’s cheap and easy. Though a .45 is a vastly more lethal round. But they aren’t as common and it takes a tad more skill to land the shot.
A running joke with ex service members like me is this “so they ban 20 round .223 mags, oh well I can still get a ten round mags of .357 you idiots”. You know why this is funny? Because .223 is used for killing something the size of a dog, .357 is a man/deer/medium animal killer. Also .223 can be thrown off track by twigs and branches, .357 or higher won’t. Banning high capacity magazines (which I’ll note jammed on them and they didn’t even fire all the rounds from) will just create a ton of lower cap mags with more lethal rounds.
I might have a different view on this because I was in the military. I don’t own an AR-15 because I have no need to play pretend soldier. But the people seeking to ban these weapons should get up to date on the facts. If I really wanted to cause a lot of carnage I wouldn’t use an AR-15. I’d backpack bomb the subway at the cross section at Chinatown where all four lines cross, and then hit people with a high powered scoped rifle as they fled subway, a bolt action even.
The reason the gun industry wants to sell the AR-15 platform is, it’s cheap to produce because the military needs so many of them so logistics come into play, and that you can spend several times the cost of the damn thing in kitting it out with upgrades. It’s a money maker, end of fucking story. Other semi .223’s don’t have the total profit margin of the AR and cost more to make. And better rifles have a smaller profit margin and are far more expensive for the initial purpose, but you can’t sell a ton of upgrades for them.
Also handguns and shotguns are semi automatic as well. And revolvers and shotguns are less prone to the jams that stopped recenting shooting sprees than the semi auto pistols and ARs everyone is screaming about. They tend to pack more lethal rounds as well.
Lastly you don’t “shoot to kill” with automatics in the military, doesn’t work. You spew out rounds to cause people to take cover and pin them down, and then move the actual killing items into place to kill them. The notion of killing people with automatic small arms fire is idiotic from a military perspective. Which is one of the reasons why they removed it from the M-4/M/-16 (aka AR 15 but fires the 5.56 Nato without breaking) platform in general.
Now that I’m done, I’m pro gun regulation. I don’t own an AR-15. And the only reason I have a gun (two pistols) is that I bought them while I was in the Navy. I wanted to go to the range and keep up on my own time so I bought a 92-fs (military known as beretta m-9), and a sig. I don’t even own any ammo for them either and they are locked in a safe. I have a rifle at my parents house, but it was my dads and he gave it to me and I gave it back. I have no reason to use it.
We should stop gun violence. But right now the argument is just over the weapons used, which are used because they are so common, they are so common because of cost/profit/logistics. And till people wrap their heads around that, nothing can be done.
I’m no gun expert, but one of the main points of this post is that banning assault weapons doesn’t make sense from the perspective of stopping a capability, but it has a cultural purpose worth considering.
I don’t need to be lectured on the fact that there are many semiautomatic weapons other than assault rifles, because I made that explicit point in the piece.
As for the Newtown shooter, he went through something like 10-15 magazines, so he didn’t stop firing because his gun jammed. You may be thinking of the Aurora, Colorado shooter.
Wrong. The Newton Shooter did not fully use all the rounds in his mags and his gun also jammed. So again, lower capacity magazines, wouldn’t have done squat. He didn’t even use half of the some the magazines he ditched.
This is one of the reasons, again as a guy who had to use guns for a living for several years, I find arguments about magazines and firing modes hilarious. Because it’s utterly unconnected from reality.
Not wrong.
Does that sound like he stopped firing because his gun jammed or does it sound like he paused in his shooting, perhaps because his gun jammed?
Keep it factual.
But Booman, the “fact” that the number one cause of jamming is (allegedly) large magazines means that large magazines ALWAYS jam! They simply NEVER work as they are engineered to by precision gun manufacturers! It’s just totally stupid to think otherwise! In fact the informed expert gun guyz know that if we really wanted to prevent mass shootings we’d ENCOURAGE even more use of the large magazines. That would solve the problem! There is no one on the gun control side who knows anything about the subject!
And the fact that this gun expert wouldn’t use an “assault” weapon to create some “real carnage” means that NO ONE would! Even when some fools do!