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Despite some of the anguished hand-wringing that has
appeared recently, it is highly improbable that Americans
will be sprayed by bullets because the assault-weapon
ban
was not renewed by Congress last week.
That's because the law, passed in 1994 with a 10-year
sunset clause, should have been known as the ugly gun
ban
rather than assault-weapon ban.
It was about
cosmetics, not firepower or public safety.
To discuss this in a sensible way, we have to start with
the difference between automatic
(or
full-auto
) and semi-automatic
(semi-auto
) weapons. With full-auto, the gun fires
for as long as it has ammunition while the trigger is
pulled -- like a machine gun. With semi-auto, it fires one
bullet for each trigger pull.
Unless you have a special federal license, full-autos
are illegal to own, and have been since 1934. So the
assault weapons
listed in the 1994 law were not
machine guns or the like; they were semi-autos, just like
many deer rifles.
They didn't fire any faster, or shoot deadlier bullets.They just looked different because they had folding stocks, or bayonet mounts, or flash suppressors -- that is, they looked like something out of a Rambo movie.
For instance, the Colt AR-15 is the civilian (semi-auto) version of the military M-16. It was banned by the assault-weapon law. The Ruger Mini-14 could shoot the same ammunition at the same rate -- but it was legal, basically because it had a handsome wooden stock instead of a tacky plastic one. It's hard to believe that this matters much, one way or the other, to public safety.
The one thing that might have mattered in the
now-expired law was the limitation on magazine capacity; a
bad weapon
had a detachable magazine with a capacity
of more than 10 rounds, while a legal one held fewer.
The more rounds in the magazine, the more bullets one
can fire before stopping to reload, or snap in another
loaded magazine. For legitimate hunting purposes, this is
sort of like carrying a sign that says I'm a terrible
shot.
My first adventures in rabbit-hunting, when I was about 12, involved a .22 rifle I shared with my cousin Byron when we visited relatives in Wyoming. It was a bolt-action single-shot. The ejector didn't work, so each spent cartridge had to be pried out with a pocket knife. We still managed to kill all the cottontails we could eat, and to this day, I think of semi-autos with big magazines as crutches for slob hunters.
Maybe the big magazines are important for self-defense, throwing lead toward household intruders, but it also increases the chance of hitting something you didn't want to hit, especially if your idea of marksmanship involves nothing more than spraying a lot of lead in the general direction of a perceived threat.
Large-capacity magazines, manufactured before the 1994 law, were widely and legally available anyway, so the law really didn't address that public-safety angle.
As nearly as I can figure, these guns that looked like assault weapons were popular with guys who wanted to pretend to be Rambo out on the firing range. The ammo is fairly cheap, and the guns make lots of noise.
They weren't especially popular with criminals -- after all, if you're going to use a banned gun, why settle for an illegal semi-auto when you could use an illegal full-auto?
One of the banned weapons, the truly ugly TEC-DC9, was used in the Columbine massacre of 1999. The shooters also had two rifles and a shotgun.
As Brian Rohrbaugh, father of slain student Daniel
Rohrbaugh put it, I guess the assault (weapons) ban did
nothing to protect my son. As it was worded, I'm not sure
it had any value other than a political agenda.
He got that right. It was a piece of legislation that protected no one.
But it did work well for politicians. Gun-control
advocates could point to a victory, even if it meant
nothing. The NRA could rant about the Clinton Gun
Ban
even if it was also supported by former Presidents
Reagan, Ford and Bush the Elder.
George W. Bush said he supported the extension of the
assault weapon ban
when he was running four years
ago. But he didn't lift a finger to get Congress even to
bring the matter to the floor, let alone pass the
extension. Of course, he's not a flip-flopper, and his
supporters will doubtless continue to tell us that he's a
steadfast man who always does what he says he will.
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