Every year, congressional gun control advocates introduce numerous bills to restrict or ban some aspect of shooting sports. One villain is always addressed: the so-called assault weapon.
A concerted disinformation campaign by gun control advocates has the average voter believing that a semi-automatic rifle is an assault rifle. In the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, Congress defined assault rifles by characteristics having nothing to do with the functioning of the firearm.
Semi-automatic rifles have been available to the public for well over a century. Yet mass shootings, which some think will disappear once semi-automatics go away, have arguably only been with us for the past 20 to 30 years. Something obviously changed to cause these mass shootings, but it clearly wasn’t the availability of semi-automatic weapons. Perhaps Congress should determine what actually changed and address those factors instead.
And never mind that each year, more people are murdered with blunt objects than by rifles, according to the FBI.
In 2012, the Department of Homeland Security published a solicitation for bids on new rifles, which were to have “select fire” capability. For the layman, think machine gun. The solicitation was titled “Personal Defense Weapons.” Apparently, a citizen’s semi-automatic rifle is an assault weapon, but the government’s fully automatic rifle is a personal defense weapon. This seems a bit incongruous.
President Joe Biden’s Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra stated in a 2019 court case that AR-15s are “not in common use for lawful purposes like self-defense.” Are they not in common use, or do gun banners not want them to be in common use?
The gun grabbers also want to ban magazines that they believe hold too much ammunition. They seem to think that defending oneself with a firearm follows a script, and according to that script, no one needs more than 10 rounds.
Consider a recent video of a solitary police officer who, with no backup, was under attack. He shot at the perpetrator 12 times before the attack was stopped. Of course, gun banners won’t limit police to 10 rounds. Is the officer’s life more important than the citizen’s? Had it been a citizen, what was he or she to do after the 10th and final round was fired?
In the city near my home in Ohio, two men walked into a meat market to commit a robbery. They didn’t point their guns and announce the robbery. They walked in and began shooting. Would one of our legislators, in such a situation, be content with just 10 rounds? My stance is that if anyone can tell me, with absolute certainty, the exact number of attackers from whom I might ever have to defend my family, I will tell them how many rounds of ammunition my magazine needs to hold.
Neither facts nor logic means anything to gun banners. They aren’t concerned with citizens defending themselves or the other legitimate uses for semi-automatic rifles. Banning semi-automatic weapons and magazines are just steps to banning all firearms. The long list of bills they propose tells the tale.
Gun banners often invoke gun control in the United Kingdom. It truly is a good example of the never-ending bans and restrictions that gun control advocates in the United States wish to achieve. Not content with making it nearly impossible to own and use a firearm, last November, some within the British government initiated action to restrict further the use and storage of air guns. No BB gun for you.
The U.K. hasn’t learned from history, and apparently, some in the U.S. haven’t, either.
Chris Beebe is a retired Marine Corps veteran and a lifelong hunter and shooter.
