Mass public killings are too common in America, but the murder of dozens of concert-goers in Las Vegas Sunday night had a unique factor. The shooter used a fully-automatic rifle to mow down the victims, of whom there were more than 500.
Reporting and commentary on guns, especially in the harrowing aftermath of mass shootings, is regularly muddled, and the press often conflates automatic weapons and semi-auto weapons. Semi-automatic weapons fire one round per trigger pull, while an automatic weapon can spray many rounds per second as long as the shooter squeezes the trigger.
While semi-automatic weapons are regulated mostly on a state-by-state basis, automatic weapons are mostly illegal, banned by a handful of federal laws. Yet the shooter in Las Vegas appears to have used an automatic weapon, according to law enforcement sources and the video of the event.
As gun control advocates yell that guns like this need to outlawed, it’s crucial to remember that guns like this already are, for the most part, outlawed.
All automatic weapons must be registered with the federal government, under the 1934 National Firearms Act. (Again, semi-automatics are registered on the state level.) In 1986, Congress basically outlawed civilian ownership of automatic weapons, although it grandfathered in previously owned guns (the undesirable alternative to grandfathering being a government confiscation of machine guns). Some government officials can own automatic guns.
If you want to buy a grandfathered machine gun, you need permission from local law enforcement, you have to pay $200, plus you must submit fingerprints and photos to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Other restrictions apply.
These facts are directly relevant to our current gun-control debate for a couple of reasons.
First, the restrictions on automatic rifles are far stricter than most proposed curbs on the sort of semi-auto “assault rifles,” such as AR-15s, used in the most notorious mass shootings in recent years. This reminds us that no gun control regime will prevent guns from being used illegally to murder large numbers of people.
Second, the disparate treatment of automatic and semi-automatic rifles provides a good opportunity to consider the balance that goes into gun-control proposals.
Aggressive gun controllers want to outlaw or severely restrict guns that are used in crimes. One problem with this is that most guns used in crimes are handguns, which are the same guns people use for home defense and self defense. The guns used in most mass shootings, meanwhile, are semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15. This is the most popular single brand of gun in America.
In short, there is generally no distinction between the types of guns criminals use to kill people and the types of guns law-abiding people own for lawful and valid purposes. They’re the same guns.
The Second Amendment enshrines the right to bear arms as a basic civil right. As with rights in general, it’s not absolute. But when we balance the desire to prevent harm to society against the risk of trampling on those rights, we tend toward protecting the rights of the law-abiding.
This balancing test produces a very different result for automatic weapons, though. Automatic weapons are like bombs in that their purpose is to kill indiscriminately. Their rapid rate of fire, which allows for mass killing in a circumstance such as Las Vegas, makes them poor tools for hunting, defensive fire, or home defense. So even when we multiply the individual liberty question by a large factor, which is fitting for an issue involving basic rights, the societal safety factor wins.
That’s why Republican lawmakers and gun-rights activists haven’t fought to overturn the strict federal rules regulating automatic weapons. The lesson of Las Vegas is that even the strictest firearms laws consistent with constitutional rights cannot prevent murder.
