The .50 caliber rifle is one of those weapons that many of us want but most of us just haven't gotten around to getting one.
After all, they're not precisely cheap and many of us don't have a range long enough--to say nothing of sturdy enough--to handle one.
One other thing about them is that we don't see them used in crime in this nation. While just about every other weapon out there is being used to some degree or another, that's just not happening with .50 calibers, either bolt-action or semi-auto.
And yet, you've got to know that some House Democrats want to ban the things anyway. Why? Because Mexico can't keep its own house in order.
Two members of Congress from Texas and one from Florida have filed a bill they say will cut down on drug cartel violence by banning .50-caliber rifles in America.
The Stop Arming Cartels Act of 2024 proposes banning the manufacture, sale, possession, importation or transfer of .50-caliber rifles by civilians in the United States. The legislation filed by Democratic U.S. Reps. Joaquin Castro and Veronica Escobar of Texas, and Maxwell Frost of Florida would require anyone who possesses one such rifle prior to the bill going into effect to register it in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record.
The bill also calls for victims of gun violence to be allowed to sue manufacturers and dealers who violate a federal statute known as the Kingpin Act. It establishes an exemption to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that shields gunmakers from most lawsuits.
Other provisions include mandating gun dealers to report multiple sales of rifles to state and local law enforcement.
“When I speak to leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean, their number-one request is for Congress to stop American weapons of war from falling into the hands of the gangs that are destabilizing their countries,” Castro said in a statement. “Especially in Mexico, access to .50-caliber rifles has fundamentally altered the balance of power between criminal organizations and the government and allowed cartels to become virtually untouchable.”
Those countries have bigger problems than a handful of American rifles being illegally purchased and trafficked into those nations.
See, what Castro is doing here is pretending that the fact that these guns are legal here is the sole reason these nations have problems. Yet if that were the case, why don't we have those same problems? Why doesn't Canada?
The more important question is just why should Americans forfeit any part of their rights because these other nations have never been able to get their own backyards straight.
Corruption reigns supreme throughout both the Caribbean and Latin America, for example. We know that a number of guns lawfully sold to government entities in Mexico have ended up in cartel hands. We also know that it's happened elsewhere in Latin America as well. Banning these rifles won't change a damn thing about the status of what's happening in these nations because the problems have nothing to do with what guns we can lawfully buy here in the United States.
That's just a convenient scapegoat for nations still upset over American meddling half a century or more ago.
But let's look at the ban from a purely American point of view. The .50 caliber rifle is perhaps the one firearm that should be untouchable under the current gun control debate. As noted, it's not used in crime at all. It's too big to conceal. They're not used in mass murder. It's a fun rifle to shoot for sporting purposes--in this case, competition versus hunting, but still a sporting use.
Based on what the anti-gunners claim about things like the AR-15 and telling us why that needs to be banned, the .50 caliber rifle should be perfectly safe.
And yet, here we are.
The thing is that yes, these rifles can be useful for some kind of insurgency, but that's why they should never be banned. Our right to keep and bear arms isn't predicated on things going swimmingly in some other part of the world. They're predicated on things going badly here and the people of the United States needing to respond.
That's the real reason they want these guns gone and want to manufacture a new way to prosecute gun dealers who fail to spot a straw purchase. My take is that they have nefarious intentions and they don't want you to be able to fight back.
