New York Times Opinion: Too Late to Ban Assault Weapons

[Doc Safari]

Boom Chaka Laka

It’s Too Late to Ban Assault Weapons
The half-life of military-style rifles ensures they’ll be with us for many generations. Time to deal with the world as it is.

With proper care and maintenance, an AR-15 rifle manufactured today will fire just as effectively in the year 2119 and probably for decades after that.

There are currently around 15 million military-style rifles in civilian hands in the United States. They are very rarely used in suicides or crimes. But when they are, the bloodshed is appalling.

Acknowledging the grim reality that we will live among these guns indefinitely is a necessary first step toward making the nation safer. Frustratingly, calling for military-style rifles bans — as I have done for years — may be making other lifesaving gun laws harder to pass.

President Trump on Wednesday — touring two mass shooting sites in Ohio and Texas — said that “there is no political appetite” for a new ban of assault weapons. Never mind that a majority of Americans support such a ban.


Short of forced confiscation or a major cultural shift, our great-great-great-grandchildren will live side-by-side with the guns we have today and make tomorrow. That also means that we’re far closer to the beginning of the plague of mass public shootings with military-style weapons than we are to the end. Little wonder that major companies are now including mass shootings in their risk to shareholder filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Not only is confiscation politically untenable — the compliance rates of gun owners when bans are passed are laughably low. The distribution of these weapons across society makes even their prohibition nearly impossible. In 1996, Australia launched a mandatory gun buyback of 650,000 military-style weapons. While gun ownership per capita in the country declined by more than 20 percent, today Australians own more guns than they did before the buyback. New Zealand’s leaders, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, launched a compulsory buyback effort for the tens of thousands of military-style weapons estimated to be in the country.

For context: In 2016 alone, more than one million military-style weapons were added to America’s existing civilian arsenal, according to industry estimates.

Not only are the number of total guns in America orders of magnitude larger than other nations, the political imagination is far less ambitious. Consider a federal assault weapons ban that Democrats introduced this year. It is purely a messaging bill since there was no chance it will win support from Republicans and become law. Yet even this thought experiment falls far short: The bill bans military-style weapons, except for the millions of military-style weapons already in circulation.

My take: Can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. So, shoot your AR's all you want, there's plenty more where they came from.

[Alex V]

Meanwhile, lots of news of "Republicans" talking AWB...

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

Meanwhile, lots of news of "Republicans" talking AWB...

Yes, because it won’t happen- therefore it’s politically safe. Or it is like the start of WWI and we’ll stumble into a bloodbath.

The caveat is this is true at the federal level, not do the states.

[markm]

"the compliance rates of gun owners when bans are passed are laughably low."

I remember it being embarrassingly high during the 94 ban. Douche bags milling off bayo studs, and ARs with no threaded barrels, etc.

None of my ARs were compliant. Eff that crap!

[Doc Safari]

"the compliance rates of gun owners when bans are passed are laughably low."

I remember it being embarrassingly high during the 94 ban. Douche bags milling off bayo studs, and ARs with no threaded barrels, etc.

Who was doing that? AFAIK only the manufacturers were coming out with ban-compliant rifles.


If anything I remember people buying surplus Chicom AK furniture and putting it on instead of the thumbhole stock. Gun shop owners would generally have a hissy fit if you walked in with a "modified" MAK-90, but I did see a couple in gun racks at stores where the owner couldn't GAF.

There was quite a hoopla over the fact that some MAK-90's had angle-cut receivers so you couldn't do just that. Later ones had the proper straight-backed receiver and those were selling at a premium. I bet ultimately 90% of MAK-90's were illegally converted to the original pistol grip and stock. This was before US-made 922(r) compliant AK's, parts, and furniture with the proper stock and P-grip so it's a case of manufacturers finally catching up with what people were doing anyway.

It's another testament to "pass all the laws you want; they will be ignored."

It seems that somebody discovered that to violate 922(r) you had to be caught making the modifications. There is evidently no prohibition against actually possessing a rifle that had been illegally converted to violate 922(r) with all foreign parts.

Nowadays nobody cares, but it was a point of contention back in the day.

[tehpwnag3]

You could buy ban-featured weapons and hi-cap mags in 94-04, but rarely did anyone want to sell them out of their personal stash. My LGS had pre-ban stuff on the wall for RIDICULOUS prices and they eventually sold.

[Biggy]

Yeah, the genie has been out of the bottle for far to long with semi-auto pistols,rifles and hi-cap mags Having a few extra bolts would be smart along with having enough affordable ammo. Ammo will be key, especially if at some point you will need some type of card or license to buy it.

[Doc Safari]

Back in the 1990's so-called "assault weapons" were "niche" firearms. I can't tell you how many times I was asked, "What do you need a gun like that for?"

My favorite was: "Those are man-killers. What do you want that for?"

My response: "You just said it."

Can't tell you how many times I watched the blood drain from someone's face after I said that.

But my all-time, never gets old favorite is:

When the subject of Fifty-caliber sniper rifles comes up and some Fudd says, "What do you hunt with that?"

My answer was always, "Semi's."

JOKING....JOKING.

[sgtrock82]

I wish I could bath myself in the tears of disgust that dripped from every word of that NYT article. Glorious.

Sent from my SM-J727T using Tapatalk

[militarymoron]

I couldn't find it in a search, but this article points out that regulating the type of weapon to reduce gun violence doesn't work:
http://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/stat...ce-gun-deaths/