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credit: nextconf.eu

Resistance is futile.

The Borg

So Congressional D/S/Cs would like to believe.  In Bruen: Ignoring The Supreme Law Of The Land, I pointed out D/S/Cs would do all they could in that , brief, desperate time before the Mid Term elections, to pass anti-liberty/gun laws in clear violation of the Constitution.  Number one on their agenda is an “assault weapon” ban, because the 1994-2004 ban was so successful.  I kid.  Actually, it was a disaster on every level, but more on that shortly.

Before we examine the most current attempt at convincing Americans any resistance to the loss of their fundamental liberties is futile, let’s revisit the basics.  Why should we write any law?  Because it is necessary to punish the guilty and protect the innocent?  Because it is absolutely necessary to ensure public safety?  Because it will pay political dividends?  Because it will enrich the donors and cronies of the party in power?  Because it will grant more illegitimate power to the party in power?  Because it will punish Normal Americans, who deserve to get it good and hard?

Ideally, no law should be written unless it is (1) absolutely necessary to accomplish a compelling, clearly beneficial public purpose, unless it is (2) clearly constitutional, unless the citizen of normal intelligence can read it and (3) know what is and is not illegal—if it is “void for vagueness” it’s unconstitutional–and unless it can (4) accomplish what its backers claim it can accomplish.  Let’s apply those simple criteria to the D/S/C House’s current “assault weapon” ban.

(1) D/S/Cs argue banning “assault weapons” will greatly enhance public safety, holding up rare school attacks committed by lunatics using AR-15 pattern rifles as examples.  Consider first the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2019, the most current information available.  In that year, 364 rifles were used in murders.  The figure is not broken down by rifle type, but “assault weapons” were a tiny portion of that total.  In comparison, knives were used in 1,476 murders, “blunt objects” in 397, fists and feet in 600 and handguns in 6,368.  If we accept the ludicrous premise crimes of violence may be mitigated by banning the tools employed—inanimate objects–rather than incarcerating and thus deterring the criminals, why aren’t D/S/Cs banning handguns, knives, blunt objects, or amputating hands and feet?

Of course, D/S/Cs aren’t interested in facts, particularly those that render their arguments nonsense.  The most deadly school attack to date is the Bath, Michigan attack, of 1927, which killed 38 children, 6 adults, and wounded at least 58.  Did an assault weapon do it?  No.  Explosives.  The second most deadly is the Virginia Tech attack of 2007, which killed 33, including the killer.  Assault weapon?  No.  Two common pistols, one in 9mm and the other in .22LR, which had only a 10 round magazine capacity, a capacity current D/S/Cs arguments claim to be safe, or at least which is the current “doesn’t need to be banned right now” limit.  If they’re successful in banning magazines of greater than 10 round capacity, they’ll surely discover banning magazines of far less capacity would be even better, or banning magazines entirely better still.

(2) Under Heller, McDonald and Bruen, any attempt to ban firearms in common and usual use by Americans is unconstitutional.  One would expect our federal legislators to acknowledge this–they all swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution–but obviously not if they’re D/S/Cs.  The bill appears to ban virtually all semiautomatic handguns, the most common, usual and popular handguns in contemporary use.  It also attempts to ban the AR-15—the most common, usual and popular rifle in America—and all similar rifles by action type, magazine capacity, and a variety of innocuous accessories that have no bearing on the rifle’s lethality, which is primarily a function of the cartridge.  The bill mostly bans rifles that fire cartridges of low to intermediate power, leaving alone rifles that fire cartridges of far greater power.  Even if passed into law, the bill is blatantly unconstitutional, and will cost taxpayers untold millions to defend the indefensible.

(3) The text of the current ban attempt—available here–is fabulously vague and nonsensical.  The bill attempts to define “assault weapon,” thus:

(v) (1) It shall be unlawful for a person to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, a semiautomatic assault weapon.

The bill takes no notice of accurate firearm terminology, and makes a near encyclopedic attempt to define a universe of banned weapons, based on cosmetic factors.  This is the Ruger Mini-14 rifle, chambered in .223 caliber:

Mini-14 Ranch Rifle
credit: Ruger

Under the bill, it is apparently legal, but should it pass, who knows for how long?  This is the Ruger Mini-14 tactical rifle, also chambered in .223 caliber.

Mini-14 Tactical Rifle
credit: Ruger

It fires precisely the same cartridge as the Mini-14, using the same semiautomatic action, but because it has an adjustable stock, a pistol grip, and a flash suppressor, it is illegal.  Do these cosmetic features render this rifle somehow more deadly, somehow more prone to use by killers?  Of course not, and the Mini-14 is by any measure not a favorite of mass shooters.  The adjustable stock, for example, merely allows the rifle to better fit shooters of varying height and arm length, and rifles of all kinds are rarely used in crimes because they’re long, heavy and essentially unconcealable.

There is no such thing as an “assault weapon,” other than in the desperate attempts of anti-liberty/gun cractivists to demonize entire classes of firearms.  There is a class of military arms known as “assault rifles,” but they are distinguished by fully automatic capability, which civilian-available semiautomatic rifles do not have.  An “assault weapon” is clearly any scary gun D/S/Cs want to ban, and the made-up term has no technical application otherwise.

(4) The bill cannot accomplish anything for public safety.  The Clinton Gun Ban was in effect for 10 years, and was allowed to sunset, because it accomplished nothing for public safety:  

This holds true even for research funded by the Clinton administration. Criminology professors Chris Koper and Jeff Roth concluded in a 1997 report for the National Institute of Justice, ‘The evidence is not strong enough for us to conclude that there was any meaningful effect (i.e., that the effect was different from zero).’

Non-government research found the same result:

Dr. John Lott and others have done similar research on both state and federal assault weapons bans.  They’ve found no evidence that any such ban reduced the frequency or deadliness of mass public shootings or had a beneficial impact on any other crime rate.  The third edition of ‘More Guns, Less Crime’ (University of Chicago Press, 2010) examined the impact of federal and state assault weapon bans both before, during, and after the federal ban was in effect.

Consider these incontrovertible facts:  

*Mass killings are very rare, accounting for only 0.2 percent of homicides every year and approximately 1 percent of homicide victims.

*Only 12 percent of mass killings are mass public shootings. Most mass killings are familicides (murders of family members or intimate partners) and felony-related killings (such as robberies gone awry or gang-related ‘turf battles’).

*Over 90 percent of public mass shootings take place in “gun-free zones” where civilians are not permitted to carry firearms.

Despite what D/S/Cs and the media—I know: one in the same—would tell us, school attacks remain thankfully rare.  Americans think otherwise because of the feverish, long-lasting, hyperbolic media play they receive.

*A complete ban on ‘assault weapons’ will save very few lives: Six out of every 10 mass public shootings are carried out by handguns alone, while only one in 10 is committed with a rifle alone.

*The average age of mass public shooters is 34, which means that increasing the minimum age for purchasing firearms would not target the main perpetrators of mass public shootings.

*After adjusting for population differences, many other developed countries have worse problems with mass public shootings than the United States has.

*There were 27 percent more casualties per capita from mass public shootings in the European Union than in the U.S. from 2009 to 2015.

Take this link to a classic Bill Whittle video that illustrates America is not the most violent nation in the world, despite our “gun culture,” far from it.  Knowing all these plain facts, why would D/S/Cs persist in trying to unconstitutionally ban firearms, while they simultaneously do all they can to enable violent criminals?  Could they possibly have—gasp!—dishonorable motives?

As Kurt Schlichter wrote, D/S/Cs hate Normal Americans.  They fear them as well, knowing if they cannot disarm them, they can never achieve their socialist/communist utopia.  So like all good communists, they do all they can to disarm their victims.  History, which they always try to rewrite, teaches no government that disarmed its citizens ever did so for good and noble purposes, and citizens disarmed are inevitably jailed, raped, tortured and murdered by the millions.  No government seeking to disarm Americans is legitimate, or American.

D/S/Cs know if they are ever able to successfully ban any class of firearms, they’ll be able to ban them all.  This will be all the easier if they are able to pack the Supreme Court, which is another of their goals.  This is why they are trying to ban “assault weapons.”  

Assault weapons-just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms-are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons-anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun-can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

There are hundreds of millions of handguns in circulation, but relatively fewer AR-15-type rifles, and several of the recent, yet still rare, school attacks employed AR pattern rifles.  Their calculation is they’ll face less public outrage in banning rifles owned by fewer Americans, particularly if they can convince them they’re banning actual machineguns and weapons used every day to slaughter school children.  The bill features a long list of guns they’re not banning, virtually all of them traditional wood and steel firearms of lever, bolt and pump action.  It’s a cheap trick intended to say” See!  Look at all the guns we’ll let you keep–for now.  We’re only trying to take away scary weapons of war!”  These assertions are lies, but when one is trying to whip up emotion and make people act without considering the consequences, or constitutionality, of their actions, deception is not only fair game, it’s the preferred tactic.

There are additional political calculations.  They know if they can pass the bill into law before the mid terms, Republicans may not be able to get enough votes in the Senate to overturn it thereafter.  At the very least, it may be years before the Supreme Court overturns the law, and they may leave at least some of it intact.  Our domestic would-be tyrants, like the Chinese, play the long game.  In the meantime, they may be able to use an entirely corrupt DOJ, FBI and other federal agencies to seize guns, throw innocent Americans in prison, and perhaps even kill some of them as lessons to the rest.  They really do hate Normal Americans, and what punishment is too severe for insurrectionists, domestic terrorists, racists, haters, homophobes, transphobes and people determined to destroy “our democracy?”  At what would people who approve of attempts to assassinate Supreme Court Justices, and to eternally harass them in their homes, stop?  What limits do the self-righteous, corrupt and indecent impose on themselves?

Consider these statements:

From the Firearms Policy Coalition:

‘The House of Representatives passed H.R.1808, which would, if enacted, criminalize the lawful and constitutionally protected conduct of millions of Americans.

In a time of economic recession, gross overreach and abuse of power by the federal government, and cascading governmental policy failures at all levels, 217 depraved representatives, including the deciding votes cast by Republicans Jacobs (NY) and Fitzpatrick, voted to violate natural rights and our Constitution, choosing to promote policies that would imprison peaceable people who have done no wrong.

There is no world in which American gun owners bend the knee and comply with this evil legislation. Further, if H.R.1808 is enacted, FPC Law will swiftly and aggressively take all actions necessary to fight and enjoin the bill.

And to all of those who supported and passed this immoral legislation, we say simply this: ‘Fuck you. No.’

From the Second Amendment Foundation and CCRKBA:

‘Passage…by the U.S. House of Representatives of a ban on so-called ‘assault weapons’ is a slap in the face to tens of millions of law-abiding firearms owners, including the 24 million citizens who lawfully own such firearms and have harmed nobody.

Supporters of this outrageous legislation have once again demonstrated their willingness to throw honest gun owners and their Second Amendment rights under the bus, rather than deal with the genuine problems of gang violence, lenient prosecutors and judges, and the weakening of our law enforcement agencies.

Today, House Democrats literally voted to penalize law-abiding gunowners for crimes they did not commit, while blaming firearms rather than criminals and their enablers. It will do nothing to reduce or prevent crime, and will instead further erode the Second Amendment, which appears to be the ultimate goal of these gun control proponents.’

Final Thoughts:  It is commonly thought it will be impossible for D/S/Cs to get the 60 votes in the Senate necessary to pass this legislation, which might be true, unless D/S/Cs abolish the filibuster, which, as they become more desperate, is always a possibility.  Yet, there are a number of D/S/C senators who, should they abolish the filibuster and vote for this bill, are likely to lose their seats, seats they might otherwise retain.  Self preservation might encourage them to break their lockstep party loyalty.  The Clinton Gun Ban cost D/S/Cs the House and the Senate and made them gun shy over anti-liberty/gun legislation for decades, but they never learn, and never stop trying to take essential liberties–that’s the long game.

Never in American history have more Americans become first-time gun owners, which is a major factor in the on-going shortage of ammunition.  Even the D/S/C media  has had to admit even black women are becoming gun owners:

In the first six months of 2021, nearly 87% of gun stores nationwide had an increase in African American women buying firearms, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Hoosiers are following the trend, too.

Vaden’s Firearms & Ammunition, located on the city’s east side, has been in business for almost six months. Owner Ryan Vaden said he has already seen a huge increase in sales, especially among black women. Vaden said six out of ten of his in-store customers are Black women as well as 90% of his out of state sales. Many of them first time gun owners. It’s all part of a national trend.

Black women are historically among the most gun-resistant, D/S/C voting bloc in American politics, but D/S/C criminal-enabling policies have convinced them they need the protection only firearms can provide.  Tragically, the Uvalde, Texas school attack—the SMM Uvalde archive is here–has further diminished respect for law enforcement, and convinced Normal Americans not that banning AR-15s or any other class of firearms is the way to safety, but where their safety is concerned, they’re on their own.

The other likely factor is D/S/Cs think even attempting, but failing, to pass this clearly unconstitutional law might help with election turnout.  It might help to fire up their base, and every vote they can buy, manufacture or steal will be helpful to lessen the likely red tidal wave threatening to overturn D/S/C rule.Regardless, one thing is clear: they really do hate Normal Americans—and the Constitution–and they’re going to do whatever they can to act on that hatred.