Scalia wrote certain things in dicta in Heller in order to get Justice Kennedy's vote, in a very narrow ruling in a case specifically about handguns.
I wouldn't read much into that on the constitutionality of "military weapon" bans -- keeping in mind of course that the things gun control advocates like to call "assault weapons" aren't actually military weapons at all, as manufacture of actual military weapons for civilian ownership has been heavily restricted since 1968 and absolutely banned since 1986.
I guess my counterargument would be that the modern sporting rifle was designed to be a military weapon. I'd be interested in learning more about the technicalities that designate something as an according-to-Hoyle military weapon, but I'm a little dubious that such a definition will cause me to forget the history of the AR-15.
Well, I suppose there really aren't any technicalities that designate a weapon as "military style" -- it's really a point that doesn't mean anything.
The military has used pump action shotguns similar to what you'd find in a duck blind, they've used Remington 700s (the most common hunting rifle and military sniper rifle), they've used air guns (all the way back to the revolutionary war -- the first semiautomatic rifles were air guns used in the Revolutionary War), they've used Ruger .22 handguns with suppressors on them...
The distinction that was made in 1986 was that anything fully automatic was banned. I think that's pretty silly, as I'm just as effective with a semi-automatic AR-15 as with a fully automatic M4A1. It makes no real difference, most military troops never flip the switch to automatic because the weapon isn't really even designed for it (machine guns need to have spare barrels, an assistant gunner, normally belt fed ammunition, etc -- they're ineffective otherwise). But that's the legal "definition" such as it is.
anyway, kind of all over the place, but the general point is this -- if you look the history of the time in which the 2nd amendment was written, civilians could -- and did -- own ships, cannon, artillery, etc at the time. Who cares about small arms if you can own a ship of the line with cannon? The concept of civilians being restricted in which types of weapons they could own based on whether or not the military could own them would have been considered ridiculous to the founding fathers. "military weapons" are the most effective weapons, if we have the right to own weapons, why would we be restricted to ineffective ones? Conversely, if you're going to ban weapons, why would banning the most effective weapons have any real impact, when a>there are still millions of them in circulation that are never going to come out of circulation, and b> even "ineffective" weapons can be just as effective as those "military style" weapons in a barely trained shooter's hands? I can literally teach someone in fifteen minutes how to be just as effective with a Glock 19 as with an M4A1 inside of a building. Even with 10 round magazines.
See, I strongly agree with you about the near equivalence of an AR-15 and an M4 carbine, and I'm glad to get further confirmation of the reading I've done suggesting that fully automatic rifle fire is highly overrated and rarely used professionally.
To me, that strongly suggests that the AR-15, even though it has become the "modern sporting rifle", is a weapon of war. It's clearly a military weapon (that's its origin and the intent behind its design). The thing that separates it from the weapon we all consider indisputably military, the selective fire M16, is a trivial amount of metal and additional machining --- and that tiny bit of extra stuff is rarely needed in the field anyways. My claim: the fact that Adolf Hitler chose to describe a rifle with a couple extra pieces of metal in the trigger assembly as a "bad-ass rifle" (my translation) has assumed an outsize role in our policy.
I think a rational target for our firearms policy should be all semi-automatic rifles with detachable (or high-capacity) magazines. Doesn't mean we should ban them or even seek to reduce the number of them in commerce today, just that those are the weapons I think we should be talking about.
All small arms are "weapons of war". Clubs and sticks are "weapons of war" in certain societies, and people kill other people with them all over the world. In some places they do so quite effectively.
That's really the fact of it.
The UK and Japan have banned pocket knives. I couldn't legally possess a Leatherman the entire six years I spent in Japan. We had metal detectors at the brow of the ships to ensure no one LEFT the ships with their every day tools they carried to do their jobs, because they would be arrested and thrown in a hole for carrying them off the ship (yes, this literally happened. 10+ days in a Japanese hole waiting on a charging decision for a junior LT on a ship there because he had a pocket knife in his backpack). The UK is now attempting to ban clubs. The logical extension of this "ban weapons of war" desire is to literally ban sticks. Everything has to be banned in order to have a perfectly "safe" society. But then people will kill each other with their fists. It's the human condition, unfortunately, and attempting to address a meatspace problem with technology bans has never proven to be effective in all of history.
Targeting semi automatic rifles with detachable or "high capacity" (another meaningless term) magazines, isn't a useful thing to do. It doesn't make any difference, won't make any difference, and can't make any difference. They were banned from 1994-2004, and that led to literally almost fifteen years of destruction of that political party and made those banned weapons the most popular weapon that has ever been designed. Again -- it's the human condition.
The reason gun rights advocates are so set against this is that every time there's a "discussion" it's designed to make something we own illegal. We can talk about it all day, but that at the end is always the goal of gun control advocates. They don't want to talk, they want to make us criminals.
I don't think the facts bear that timeline out, but I'm certain we're just talking about different things. From the top of the thread: my concern is about mass casualty shooting events, particularly the kind in which the shooter can stand off first-responder police forces (or, in the most horrible cases, get a clear line of fire on a crowd of people from a fortified position).
I don't think an assault weapons ban is going to do anything about routine gun crime. But it doesn't have to. (I also think "bans" are dumb).
Which timeline? 1994-2004? They banned a bunch of scary looking guns to save the children for ten years. It wasn't successful. That was my entire point with that -- if I got a detail wrong I'm happy to be corrected.
The mass casualty shooting events aren't going to be affected by the technology solution. In Japan just a couple of years ago a guy walked into a home for disabled people with a sword and killed ten or so of them as I recall. Swords are banned in Japan, along with knives and guns.
In the Tokyo subway not too long ago a death cult released a bunch of poison gas and killed a bunch of people. Again, guns, swords, knives are all banned. We're not talking only certain types of guns are banned, Japan doesn't fuck around -- they banned EVERYTHING. Even pocket knives. Didn't stop people who wanted to kill people from killing people.
Columbine -- they messed up their explosives (fortunately!), but that was the plan on how they were going to hold off first responders and kill a bunch more people. Same thing in the Atlanta bombing as I recall. Information is out there, it's not hard. You can buy the ingredients to make common explosives at Walmart. You can kill a lot of people with a Remington 700 if you want to.
Another AWB (or regulation, or talking about it) isn't going to affect crime in any way. If we want to fix the problem in the US, we ought to be looking at what happened to cause people to think that murdering people was ok. Pieces of metal didn't do that, something went wrong in our culture that did that.
BTW sorry this is like a day after the conversation, every time I type more than two replies in a thread I get rate limited and can't post anymore. This site drives me nuts.
I agree that the original FAWB was performative and ineffective.
But it happened that way because interest groups lobbied the original proposals, which were far more coherent, down to an ineffective, face-saving stump. I don't accept the FAWB as a serious reference point in gun policy; it isn't. The right discussion to have is about regulating all detachable-magazine semi-automatic long guns.
I'm not sure where Aum Shinrikyu gets you in a discussion like this, because I'm confident our polity agrees roundly that random people can't possess Sarin.
You can kill a lot of people with all sorts of weapons. But tactical rifles and Sarin gas are examples of weapons that allow ordinary people to kill outsized numbers of victims while standing off first responders that would otherwise be able to cut spree killings short, and those kinds of killings would be the target of a new assault weapon ban.
The point is that you can ban things all day long, and it doesn't actually have any effect on the people who are going to break the law. It affects me, because I strictly follow the laws even though I believe they both violate the Constitution and my natural rights, because a society where laws are ignored is a society that cannot function -- but I digress and that's another discussion.
Someone who is going to commit mass murder isn't going to sit down and think "well, they made my favorite weapon illegal, so I guess I just can't do it anymore". It simply doesn't work that way -- it's not difficult at all to find a way, just like the tokyo death cult and just like the dude who chopped up a nursing home with a samurai sword in a country where possession of both is illegal, and just like people regularly murder each other with knives and baseball bats in the UK.
BTW, I try never to say the names of any of these people who commit mass murder. I really think a HUGE part of why people do this is because they want the attention the media gives mass murderers, and I think their names should be shut out of the history books.
The crime bill was slightly reduced in impact from the overall ban the left wanted, but it banned possession and manufacture of any semiautomatic weapon that had a scary feature and limited magazine capacity to ten rounds as I recall.
There's no data that even suggests it had any effect nor would have the overall ban they wanted. The only people who follow the law are by definition law abiding people. I don't think it's likely that there's some subset of people out there who just accidentally pick up an AR-15 because it happens to be around and go commit mass murder. We're not talking about crimes of passion here, we're talking about sociopaths who are generally above average IQ, quite capable of getting their hands on anything they want to get their hands on, whether it's legal or not. A person willing to murder a school isn't going to be stopped by some minor difficulty in obtaining the exact brand of weapon they want.
Another point - manufacturing fully automatic weapons is a remarkably easy task. There are people who have made a functional AK-47 out of a shovel. The Sten gun plans have been publicly available for 50+ years, and that's one of the simplest weapons there is to build. Banning an AR-15 doesn't make hundreds of years of knowledge in machining vanish. You don't even need a mill to make a Sten, but if you have a mill that costs a couple of thousand dollars you can pretty much make any weapon you want in your garage. Spend a few more dollars and you can just plug a thumb drive into the CNC controller and push a button and have a computer make it for you, very little skill required.
A gun ban would likely be just as effective as the cannabis ban has been. It would put thousands of law abiding citizens in jail for a made up crime, and it would probably accomplish exactly nothing in terms of public safety. And it would be mostly ignored by the citizenry. There are 300+ million black rifles in the hands of the public, how do you propose to take them away?
There's another issue, most of this gun ban talk comes from people who live in cities, and really don't understand why semi automatic rifles exist. If you've never needed to hunt coyotes that were destroying livestock or kill varmints that are digging up your pasture and destroying livestock, or defend your life in a situation where the nearest county sheriff is a hundred miles away and you probably can't even reach him by radio until the end of the day if you're lucky (there are some really nasty people that live on the fringes of society where there's nobody to bother them too much), you can't really appreciate why it pisses us off to hear city folk talking about how they need to take our guns away because they're scary and because criminals exist. There will always be criminals. If you made all guns vanish today, they'd use bombs. If you made all bombs vanish today, they'll just use swords. When you're banning sticks like the UK one has to wonder where the ridiculousness ends. VA is literally trying to ban pieces of metal that look like they could be turned into a gun right now.
You can search "ranch rifle author:tptacek" if you want to get a sense of my patience level with these mic-drop appeals to wooden-stock coyote hunting rifles.
As I've said repeatedly, and you don't seem to be acknowledging: the original gun control proposals were far more ambitious than what they got whittled down to. The original proposal, as I've said, was semi-automatic rifles writ large. Appeals to the performative "crime bill" restrictions are not interesting.
I'm also losing patience with the arguments about "bans". I don't think bans are a good idea either, and I'd appreciate it if you'd stop demanding that I defend them.
that search comes back with nothing. Anyway, if the desire is to ban semiautomatic detachable magazine rifles, that's what is being banned. And most people don't even understand that, the proponents of the last AWB didn't.
>and those kinds of killings would be the target of a new assault weapon ban.
Maybe you slipped there? You're right, the original desire, and the always desire, from the left, is to ban everything. Not even just semi-autos, they want to go to the UK/Japan model where everything is banned. That's the desire. If you want something else, it's going to be step 1 in the incremental ban of everything. That's always how it is. It's an article of faith with the left that guns are bad and only bad people want guns.
We need to ban guns (maybe "some" guns that are scary enough or you or somebody has determined I shouldn't be able to own) for the children because guns kill people. That's the argument you are making, even if you couch it in other terms. If you're not, what argument are you actually making?
It's pretty much banning firearms unless you're rich. The training requirement alone would cost thousands of dollars, the licensing requirement costs 800 bucks a year, and it has an outright ban on magazines.
So, if we apply the same standard to voting or publication...
I wouldn't read much into that on the constitutionality of "military weapon" bans -- keeping in mind of course that the things gun control advocates like to call "assault weapons" aren't actually military weapons at all, as manufacture of actual military weapons for civilian ownership has been heavily restricted since 1968 and absolutely banned since 1986.