Control (7 page)

January 24, 2013: “I believe this bill is a big step toward ending the mass shootings that have devastated families across the country—from Newtown to Aurora, from Tucson to Virginia Tech,
from Columbine to Oak Creek.”

Dianne Feinstein might want to listen to Vice President Joe Biden, who, after meeting with Democratic senators about various gun control legislation, said, “
Nothing we’re going to do is going to fundamentally alter or eliminate the possibility of another mass shooting . . . ”

Despite debating gun control for decades, Senator Feinstein (who was also the author of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban) refuses to accept reality: assault weapons bans do absolutely
nothing, because “assault” weapons are not functionally different from any other semi-automatic weapons. More on that in a minute, but first let’s look at the evidence.

Feinstein points to two studies by criminology professors Chris Koper and Jeffrey Roth for the National Institute of Justice to back up her contention that the previous ban reduced crime. On her website about the 2013 assault weapons ban
she references a part of a 1997 study that, on its own, seems to be pretty conclusive: “Our best estimate of the impact of the ban on state level gun homicide rates is that it
caused a reduction of 6.7% in gun murders in 1995 relative to a projection of recent trends.”

It’s unfortunate that Feinstein stopped reading after that sentence. After all, if she’d simply read the next two she might’ve come away with a very different impression:

However, with only one year of post-ban data, we cannot rule out the possibility that this decrease reflects chance year-to-year variation rather than a true effect of the ban. Nor can we rule out effects of other features of the 1994 Crime Act or a host of state
and local initiatives that took place simultaneously.

And this, one paragraph later:

Using a variety of national and local data sources,
we found no statistical evidence
of post-ban decreases in either the number of victims per gun homicide incident, the number of gunshot wounds per victim, or the proportion of gunshot victims with multiple wounds. Nor did we find assault weapons to be overrepresented in a sample of mass murders involving guns. (emphasis added)

If this is the study that Feinstein is publicly citing, imagine what the studies she’s ignoring must have found!

Koper and Roth smartly suggested in their report that it may take more time for a demonstrable impact to be seen. So, seven years later, in 2004, they studied the ban again and published a follow-up paper for the National Institute of Justice with fellow criminologist Dan Woods as a coauthor.

Nothing had changed. While reiterating that it may take more time to fully assess the ban, they nonetheless concluded: “
[W]e cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. And, indeed, there has been no discernible reduction in the lethality and injuriousness of gun violence . . . . ”

And, perhaps the most damning quote of all: “Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs were
rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban.”

As talk about the 2013 ban began to heat up and the White House announced several proposals, the National Institute of Justice wrote a private memo titled “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies”—eventually obtained by the media—that addressed each of the initiatives. To say they were unenthusiastic about the impact of the assault weapons ban would be an understatement:

Prior to the 1994 ban, assault weapons were used in 2–8% of crimes. Therefore a complete elimination of assault weapons would not have a large impact on gun homicides. A National Academy study of firearms and violence concluded that the weaknesses of the ban and the scientific literature suggest that
the assault weapon ban did not have an effect on firearm homicides.

Given how well that memo makes the case against the ban, I’m surprised Feinstein hasn’t yet linked to it from her website.

“Antonin Scalia, the most conservative member of the Court . . . disagrees with [National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne] LaPierre on the Second Amendment.
Scalia does not believe that the right to bear arms is absolute.”

—LAWRENCE O’DONNELL

“Your Second Amendment rights do not extend to allowing you the capacity as a U.S. citizen to possess artillery capable of shooting an aircraft out of the sky.
And it’s not very controversial that that’s the case.”

—RACHEL MADDOW

“Indeed, even conservative Justice Antonin Scalia conceded in his opinion in
District of Columbia v. Heller
that ‘dangerous and unusual weapons’ of
the sort not ‘in common use’ by the public can be regulated or banned.”

—THINKPROGRESS

Even Scalia believes that “military-style” semi-automatic weapons can be banned!

That is pretty much what people like Lawrence O’Donnell and Rachel Maddow are trying to say or imply when they offer up these arguments. But while it’s true that Justice Scalia’s opinion in the 2008
Heller
case states that some types of gun control are permissible, that hardly means, despite what O’Donnell and Maddow might like, that he or the Court endorses bans on common firearms and accessories, like AR-15 rifles and fifteen-round magazines.

But before we get to the validity of these quotes, let’s take a step back and review what Scalia and the Supreme Court actually said about restrictions on the Second Amendment in their 2008
Heller
opinion:

Although
we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

The Court also added a footnote: “We identify these presumptively lawful regulatory measures only as examples; our list does not purport to be exhaustive.”

Each of the “presumptively lawful regulatory measures” mentioned in the decision tells us something about the meaning of the right to keep and bear arms.

First, there are “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.” These are exceptions to the general rule that individual Americans have a right to possess arms. Of course, this exception makes sense only if there is a general rule that people can possess arms. If no individual has a right to own a gun, there would be no point in announcing a special exception for felons and the mentally ill.

The next exception they listed was that it’s permissible to have “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” Again, the exception proves that there is a general rule under which individual Americans have the right to bear firearms in public places. The exception to that rule is “sensitive places.” If Americans did not have the general right to carry firearms, there would be no sense in announcing a special exception about certain places where they
cannot
do so.

Last on the list of examples is “laws imposing conditions and
qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” The Court did not elaborate, but the word
commercial
is important. It suggests that there might be constitutional problems with laws that impose “conditions and qualifications” on the
non
commercial transfer of firearms by private individuals. It’s one thing for the government to regulate gun stores or home businesses that are routinely engaged in firearms commerce; it’s another thing entirely to impose similar conditions and qualifications on private citizens who want to occasionally give or sell a personal firearm to a friend or family member.

But what about those outright bans? The part of
Heller
that seems to make controllists most euphoric is this quote: “
[T]he Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.” Using this reasoning, we might also say that poison gas and nuclear bombs are “not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes,” and so the possession of them is not protected by the Second Amendment.

But what about the other side of that quote? If the Constitution does not protect weapons that are
not
common, then doesn’t it stand to reason that it
does
protect those weapons that are? After all, the
Heller
court struck down the D.C. handgun ban because it applied to “an entire class of ‘arms’ that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose” of self-defense.

Maddow is obviously right about people not being able to “possess artillery capable of shooting an aircraft out of the sky.” But by using such an extreme example, she actually illustrates exactly why semi-automatics are permitted by the Constitution: artillery would clearly be considered, as the Court referenced, a “dangerous or unusual” weapon, one that, by any standard,
is certainly not “in common use” by the public.

But that logic completely falls apart when you try to apply it to AR-15s or high-capacity magazines.

While the definition of an “assault weapon” is always changing based on the political winds, there are probably at least 10 million firearms that would be banned under Senator Feinstein’s 2013 definition of “assault weapon.”
There are about 4 million AR-15 rifles in America.

Currently, about
82 percent of new handguns manufactured in the United States are semi-automatics. Many of them come with factory-standard (not “high-capacity”) magazines of 11 to 20 rounds. For the AR-15, a 30-round magazine is standard. The number of magazines in the United States holding more than 10 rounds is likely in the tens of millions.

With that level of popularity and mass appeal, it’d be a big stretch to claim that any of these weapons and accessories is in any way “unusual” or not commonly used. So, with all apologies to MSNBC and the liberal blogosphere, Antonin Scalia is still not your friend.

“Weapons of war have no place on our streets, or in our schools, or
threatening our law enforcement officers.”

—PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
,
February 4, 2013

“Weapons designed originally for the military
to kill large numbers of people in close combat are replicated for civilian use.”

—SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN
(D-CA), January 24, 2013

“[The Newtown killer used] a weapon that was designed only to kill and maim people—not for hunting, not for recreation or competitive sport, but to kill and maim people at war.
It’s a military-style weapon.”

—SENATOR RICHARD BLUMENTHAL
(D-CT), December 18, 2012

Have you ever stopped to think how powerful a particular word or phrase can be in shaping someone’s response to an issue? Controllists have. That’s why, when they talk about semi-automatic rifles, they intentionally use terms like “weapons of war” and “military-style.”

A recent study done by psychologists at Stanford University measured the difference in response between the sentences: “Crime is a beast ravaging the city of Addison” and “Crime is a virus ravaging the city of Addison.” After reading one of those sentences people were asked whether they’d support tougher law enforcement in an effort to control crime. The results reveal why controllists are so careful with their language: The group that read crime defined as a “beast” was 32 percent more likely to recommend tougher enforcement. The study authors wrote that “even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and
how they gather information to make ‘well-informed’ decisions.”

This is why the term “gun control” is morphing into “gun safety.” Jonathon Schuldt, a professor of communications at Cornell University, explained the rationale:

In a nation where freedom is among the deepest ideals, control is almost a dirty word, and
it is much easier to justify why one is against control than it is to justify why one is against safety.

A quick Google news search over headlines from the last few weeks reveals that this new terminology is spreading fast:

• CBS News:
Biden on gun safety: No more excuses

• 
Detroit Free Press:
Debate over gun safety, rights comes home to Oakland County

• 
ThinkProgress:
Gun Safety Advocates Force NRA Backed Democrat out of Congressional Race

• 
New York Times
:
Biden Presses Senate Democrats to Support Gun Safety Agenda

• ABC News:
Chicago officials push for new gun safety legislation

The same principle applies to this argument about “military-style weapons”—the term itself is an immediate tip-off as to the real motivation of these people. Keep an eye out for this kind of language when you hear gun control proposals from people who claim to be “reasonable”—it’s an immediate tip-off as to their real motivation.

Putting aside the language games, the argument for banning the kinds of weapons that Obama, Feinstein, and Blumenthal are talking about is total nonsense. None of the weapons banned under the 1994 legislation or the updated version are, in fact, “military” weapons. In other words, they might
look
like menacing machine guns, but they fire only one bullet for each pull of the trigger.

The killer in Newtown used a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle. This weapon bears a physical resemblance to the M-16, a machine gun that has been used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War. It’s frequently said that there is “no reason” for such “military-style weapons” as the Bushmaster to be available to civilians. But isn’t that a lot like saying there is no reason why any civilian should drive a military-style car like the Hummer?