Brady's Defense of GOSAFE Act Highlights Bill's Problem

AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane

The folks at Brady aren’t gun people. We know they’re not gun people and they know it too.

What they are, though, are gun control people. That means they look at the world through that lens, which would be fine if they also understood the flip side of things.

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We, on the other hand, kind of have to look at both sides. For one thing, we’re constantly bombarded by the gun control argument through the media’s inherent anti-gun bias. Further, we also have to consider the evil people do with guns if for no other reason that to make sure we can defend ourselves against it.

Recent comments over the GOSAFE Act made by Brady, however, kind of illustrate the difference in thinking here.

Randy Kozuch, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement that the bill would ban “the very types of firearms and magazines most often utilized by Americans for defending themselves and their families.”

He said the bill “blatantly violates” the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court rulings.

Fourteen states and Washington, D.C., have their own bans on large-capacity magazines, according to the Giffords Center to Prevent Gun Violence, though those laws are facing new court challenges in the wake of a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that’s led to widespread upheaval in the nation’s firearm-law landscape.

But Mark Collins, director of federal policy at Brady, the gun violence prevention organization, said this new approach, focused on the gas-operated mechanism and the nondetachable magazine, is unique. The time it takes to stop and reload, he said, is often the “critical moment” when a mass shooter can be stopped.

“This will not prevent mass shootings because you can’t prevent mass shootings in a free society where everyone has access to a firearm,” Collins said.

“But what it can do is, it can significantly mitigate the damage that someone could do in a targeted mass attack.”

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Yet that difficulty with reloading also illustrates a key problem with the measure, besides its blatantly unconstitutional nature.

If you create a law that makes it so I can’t reload my firearms quickly and efficiently, and I’m set upon by a number of bad guys–and yes, that kind of thing happens–that inability to quickly reload may well render me unable to defend myself.

Oh, I can probably fight for a bit, but that pause in me reloading might be the pause the bad guy needs to take me down.

Further, let’s remember that before this, Brady tripped all over themselves defending magazine restrictions. This was despite the fact that Parkland was such a brutal mass shooting where the killer only had 10-round magazines.

The need to reload didn’t actually stop the horrors of that day, now did they?

See, some people can and do take advantage of a bad guy reloading and start fighting back. Far too often, though, people are too busy running to figure out if the killer is reloading his weapon or not. As such, this will likely have minimal impact on the number of fatalities at mass shootings.

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Especially as most mass shootings involve handguns and not the dreaded “assault weapons” anyway.

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