The New York Times editorial board argued Friday that a “super destructive” gun once banned under the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban is available for purchase anywhere in the United States — except that the rifle referenced by the newspaper doesn’t appear to have been included in the now-defunct federal law.
“As each new mass shooting leaves dead and wounded Americans strewn like casualties on a battlefield … the gun industry’s culpability amounts to war profiteering through the reckless sale of military weapons tailored for the civilian homefront,” the Times said in an editorial flagged Friday by the Federalist’s Sean Davis.
From there, the editorial went on to bemoan that a certain type of firearm that was never outlawed under the federal law, which expired in 2004, is now available for purchase by anyone of legal age in the United States.
“Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004,” the editorial board said. “As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle, which an 18-year-old can easily buy in many places even where he or she must be 21 to buy a simpler handgun.”
But there appear to be a few problems with this claim.
First, a .50 caliber sniper rifle is typically bolt-action, and rifles with this type of action weren’t covered by the former ban. In the part of the 1994 federal law where it discussed rifles, the text of the bill said specifically that it wouldn’t, “apply to … any firearm that is manually operated by bolt, pump, lever, or slide action.”
As for the rifles that were affected, the law stated that the ban would apply only to semi-automatics that had at least two of five features: A collapsible stock, a mount for a bayonet, a flash suppressor, a pistol grip, and a grenade launcher. That means other versions with just one of these features were still legal.
And that wasn’t the only problem with the Times’ op-ed.
It also makes no effort to differentiate between a semi-automatic rifle and the type of fully automatic weapons by used the military. The newspaper instead conflates the two by referring to the former as a “barely altered” version of latter.
“Across recent decades, gun manufacturers, facing a decline in general gun ownership as demographics shifted and sports hunting faded, have cynically created a domestic market for barely altered rifles and pistols developed for the military,” the editorial reads.
However, as the Federalist’s Sean Davis noted, there is a big difference between a semi-automatic and a military grade fully automatic rifle.
“For years, gun controllers deliberately obscured the difference between the two, regularly referring to semi-automatic guns (one trigger pull, one bang) as automatic weapons (one trigger pull, lots of bangs until you run out of ammunition),” he wrote.
He accused the Times of first deliberately conflating the two terms, and then parroting “the notion that there’s no real difference between the two types.”
The Friday editorial also suggested incorrectly that it’s all too easy for anyone to walk into a store and legally buy military style “assault weapons” designed for “rapid spray-shooting of multiple enemy soldiers in wartime, not homeland civilians living in peace.”
“[T]he latest casualty count of 14 killed and 21 wounded last week in the gun carnage at San Bernardino, Calif., is another horrendous confirmation of how these easily available weapons — marketed as macho tools for a kind of paramilitary self-defense — are being used again and again for rapid-fire attacks on innocent people,” the editorial said.
“The fact that the California killers were self-proclaimed Islamic warriors makes the ease with which their arsenal was assembled all the more outrageous,” it added.
What the editorial failed to mention, however, is that while Farook and Malik obtained their weapons legally, they broke several state and federal gun laws by making illegal modifications to the weapons – to make them like actual military grade firearms. The Wall Street Journal noted that it takes “some expertise” to make these modifications.
