Thankfully, Gov. Tim Walz is likely to be disappointed again this year. His proposed assault weapon ban is pretty much dead, and I just don't see it coming back.
But the "thinking" that went behind it won't go away, and that means we need to discuss the logic of opposing it.
Anti-gunners pretend these measures are the most natural, reasonable thing imaginable. They can't understand why anyone would oppose them, even the Minnesota measure that basically required everyone who owned one of these guns to open their homes to the authorities, no warrant required.
And yeah, there is a logic to opposing these measures, as an op-ed in the Minnesota Star-Tribune notes.
But surely, especially after the painful and tearful testimony of victims of a gun-related tragedy, facts exist that would justify this radical “need for reasonable regulation.”
Well, no, actually.
In fact, in the one and only study actually commissioned by the Department of Justice on the issues of the effectiveness of the 10-year ban on “assault rifles,” it was found to have no appreciable effect. See: Christopher S. Koper, Daniel J. Woods and Jeffrey A. Roth, “An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003” (Philadelphia: Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, June 2004), which is available on the Department of Justice website at tinyurl.com/DOJWeaponsBan.
Drilling into the FBI statistics and studies offers something of an explanation of this conclusion that seems so contrary to the common anti-gun argument. In a four-year study (“Murder Victims by Weapon, 2015-2019”), the FBI determined that there were something over 10,000 murders (presumably excluding suicides) per year. Of these, between 200 and 300 involved rifles, the category in which AR-15 style rifles would be included. In other words, about 2% (and one can reasonably assume most of that was in the area of gang violence).
Almost all mass shootings (defined as having four or more victims) involve handguns. And most of those are gang-related. Charlie Kirk was in the process of explaining, yet again, exactly this point when he was shot.
And most gun deaths generally are suicides of white men. If you were to magically make all AR-15 style rifles disappear overnight, it would have virtually no effect on any of these numbers. Zip. Doodah. Yet the gun death tragedy would certainly continue. And millions of people would immediately feel deprived of their own personal safety.
More accurately, they'd be less safe.
Like it or not, the AR-15 is a great platform for protecting your home. There are downsides, sure, but there are downsides to every choice you care to name. We take the option that presents the fewest from our perspective, and the AR-15 has very few, especially in the day and age of not having to pay $200 for a tax stamp to have a short-barreled AR-15.
As noted, though, a ban on these guns will accomplish absolutely nothing because these weapons are rarely used in crimes at all. Plus, those cases where they are, there's absolutely no evidence suggesting that the criminals in question wouldn't opt to use either an illegal AR-15 or some other weapon entirely.
But it would trample the rights of millions of people, an untold number of whom live in Minnesota.
Look, this bizarre idea that you can just ban a gun, particularly on the state level, and then suddenly all of your problems vanish is asinine. Do they forget that the "spark" of the modern mass shooting epidemic was Columbine? That happened during the federal assault weapon ban's existence, and how much good did it do? Columbine is still mentioned in hushed tones like you'd use at a funeral, and it is for a reason. It's still one of the larger mass killings in modern American history.
The 1994 Assault Weapon Ban didn't do a damn thing to prevent it.
I've said before that the problem isn't the tool, it's the tool using it. I'll stand by that for the rest of my days.
Gun control isn't logical. These measures aren't "reasonable."
I'm glad this one is dead. I just wish I could trust that this proposal would stay dead.
