Banning assault weapons, the perennial fantasy

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Asked about new gun control measures during a visit to Nantucket, Joe Biden said that “the idea that we still allow the purchase of semi-automatic weapons in this country today is sick. It is just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None.” He went on to say that there will be a new effort to ban assault weapons, even during the lame duck session of Congress prior to the new term beginning in January, depending on what he hears about potential vote counts.

This comes from the same person who told his wife—and passed on the advice to the country—that firing off two blasts at nothing in particular from a double-barrel shotgun would be enough to deter would-be home invaders, adding that an AR-15 is not needed for personal protection, especially since it is supposedly harder to aim and use than the twelve gauge. And the same person who claimed that a trauma surgeon explained the rise in gun deaths from a prevalence of 9mm rounds blowing out lungs, a caliber that Biden argued has “no rational basis for it in terms of self-protection.”

Which is to say, the current president of the United States has not the slightest idea what he is talking about when it comes to firearms. Or politics, unless he is merely flailing about in hopes that no one will remember his realism during the transition period when he told a video conference of black leaders that he would have no authority to get rid of assault weapons by executive order and that were he to attempt such a thing, the next president could declare that “everybody can have machine guns again.”

I cannot say if no one has fought harder to ban various types of guns, as he claimed in that meeting, but he certainly has been a vocal, if muddled opponent of gun rights for a long time, having been deeply involved in the first ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004, among other pieces of gun control passed into law. But unless he can convince Democrats in the Senate to toss out the filibuster, working to pass any new bills of that nature has no practical hope, either between now and January or in the next Congress when Republicans take control of the House.

Banning what Democrats call assault weapons has been a perennial urge for the party ever since the first limitations on their sale expired during the first term of George W. Bush. This, despite the Heller ruling that declared that the Second Amendment protects weapons in common use—something that would seem to apply at least to the AR-15 pattern of firearm, there being an estimated twenty million in the hands of Americans, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s review of public documents—and despite the finding in this year’s Bruen decision that the only step in analyzing a gun law is to see how well it conforms to the “Second Amendment’s text, as informed by history.” Even under a reading of this decision that is generous to gun control advocates and takes the National Firearms Act of 1934 into its historical analysis would have to find that semiautomatic firearms have never been banned entirely and that the 1994 restriction on sales expired because there was no other way to gain support for it to be enacted. The alternative, one that I am told almost daily, is that the Constitution can be amended—as Michael Moore, among many others would like to do—but I always ask anyone making that suggestion to note the high bar for altering the basic law of the nation and to consider what might happen to gun laws in a country with just about enough states to support much stronger constitutional protections for gun rights.

On so many matters, the Democratic Party prefers to be performative rather than to perform. Every once in a while, they can be spurred into action, though what they have come up with in the last thirty years has been a list of partial measures, some of which were modest improvements—the Affordable Care Act, for example—while the egregious 1994 crime legislation saddled the country with a lot of burdens that have proved ineffective at doing anything beyond making life for the law-abiding more difficult. They are finally trying to protect same-sex and interracial marriages this year, years to decades after the Supreme Court beat them to it, and the bill may become law, despite opposition from right-wing Christian groups. Democrats show little evidence of having learned that fifty years of marching and whining have done little to codify abortion rights, however, and they froth at the mouth whenever I mention that millions of Americans lack sufficient healthcare, access to higher education, or a living wage—and the whole world’s population faces the collapse of the environment necessary for human civilization.

But these things are bulk fodder for campaigns. And no Democrat will do anything, for good or for ill, if doing so would remove the opportunity to raise money and make advertisements. With regard to gun control, this is better than imposing more burdens on American gun owners, but it is not sustainable, since the causes of violence and solutions for the same—along with any other measure that would achieve genuine progress—have no chance of passing while the parties yell at each other in public and form three-way handshakes with donors as the intermediaries out of the sight of cameras.