Today is the deadline for individuals and groups to file amicus briefs with the Supreme Court in support of the "assault weapon" bans in Cook County, Illinois and the state of Connecticut. The briefs are starting to trickle in, including one more incredibly odd amicus brief that's up there with the bonkers brief we discussed on Monday.
This particular brief comes from a group called CRIME, which stands for "Citizens' Response to Increased Muzzle Energy," and it offers a bizarre argument for the justices to consider: banning firearms based on a mathematical formula the group calls "Measure of Muzzle Energy per Minute," or MEpM.
That measurement is determined by multiplying the muzzle energy per shot and the rounds fired per minute. The brief contends that the higher the MEpM, the more lethal a firearm is. And as you might expect, CRIME believes that AR-15s and many other semi-automatic long guns are simply too lethal to be protected by the Second Amendment.
So where does Dirty Harry come into play? In its brief, CRIME argues that "the AR-15rifle vests an exponentially-higher amount of firepower in individual hands beyond any other historical or current firearm."
To borrow from popular culture, it would take eight Inspector Callahans, each emptying their 6-shot .44 Magnum revolvers (“the most powerful handgun in the world”) three times in a minute to equal the firepower of one person armed with an M1 Garand rifle, a mid-range AR-15 archetype, that expends 85,219 ft-pounds per minute of MEpM, firing 30-rounds in that same timeframe.
I don't know what's more ridiculous: describing the M1 Garand, which was adopted by the U.S. military in the 1930s, as an "AR-15 archetype," or suggesting that eight Dirty Harrys firing 144 rounds in a minute are somehow no more dangerous than a single individual with a semiautomatic rifle.
But the problems with CRIME's argument go well beyond its bizarre comparisons.
For starters, the formula doesn't actually measure lethality. It measures the theoretical amount of muzzle energy a firearm can produce in a minute, assuming a particular rate of fire. It doesn't account for accuracy, shot placement, the distance between the shooter and the target, or whether any of those rounds actually hit someone.
Someone who fires 30 rounds and misses every shot would have the same MEpM as someone who fires 30 rounds and hits 30 people, so long as they're using the same firearm and ammunition. That may tell us something about the amount of energy leaving the muzzle, but it doesn't tell us much about the actual danger posed by the person pulling the trigger.
There's also a major issue with how CRIME arrived at its numbers. The group touts its formula as an objective standard, but the appendix to its brief acknowledges that most of the rates of fire used in its calculations are estimates rather than figures derived from published sources.
So, CRIME wants the Supreme Court to move away from the "common use" test because it supposedly involves too much guesswork, and instead adopt a formula that depends in large part on somebody guessing how many rounds a particular gun can fire in a minute. I wouldn't call that an improvement.
CRIME also has a pretty convenient dividing line when it comes to which guns should be protected. Semiautomatic handguns are okay, as are bolt-action rifles, including some pretty powerful big-game hunting rifles. But the AR-15, AK-47, M1 Garand, Springfield M1A, and other semiautomatic rifles are apparently so dangerous that states should be free to ban them.
It doesn't matter that these guns have different designs, fire different cartridges, or have different magazine capacities. According to CRIME, they're all on the wrong side of its mathematical equation, and that's enough to put them outside the protection of the Second Amendment.
CRIME makes a passing attempt to give its formula some historical legitimacy by pointing to colonial-era laws against going armed in a manner that terrorized the public. But there's an enormous difference between prohibiting someone from threatening the public with a weapon and prohibiting peaceable Americans from possessing that weapon in the first place.
The group also draws an analogy to the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment decisions involving modern surveillance technology, arguing that just as courts have adapted constitutional protections to account for advances in technology, they should do the same when it comes to firearms.
There's a big problem with that argument, though. In cases involving modern surveillance, the Supreme Court has recognized that new technology can require greater protections for individual rights. CRIME wants the justices to use technological advances as an excuse to reduce the protections afforded by the Second Amendment.
The biggest flaw in CRIME's argument is that the Second Amendment doesn't protect only those firearms that produce a subjective "acceptable" amount of muzzle energy per minute, and it doesn't give lawmakers the authority to decide that a commonly owned firearm has become too effective at its intended purpose to remain constitutionally protected. There is simply nothing in the text of the Second Amendment (much less the history and tradition of gun ownership) that suggests the right to keep and bear arms disappears once a firearm crosses some arbitrary threshold of foot-pounds per minute.
CRIME's proposal would effectively allow lawmakers to decide which arms are protected based on a calculation of their choosing as opposed to deciding which arms are protected based on cosmetic features or how they operate (like the most recent iterations of prohibitions targeting all gas-operated centerfire semi-automatic rifles). CRIME hasn't discovered some brilliant mathematical solution to the constitutional problems with bans on commonly owned semi-automatic firearms. It's just found another (and far more complicated) way to argue that the government should get to decide which guns we're allowed to own.