Assault Weapons
My initial thought was that assault rifles are like pornography, I know one when I see one. But that's not good enough as it's not objective. Wikipedia has a definition here. I think that's too complicated, since I know almost nothing about guns and I don't fully understand it. To my mind the definition should be very simple. There should be a general ban on civilians owning weapons which are lethal under normal circumstances that do not require the user to pull the trigger for each shot. Given SHK's analysis of the inability of a civilian militia to stand up to the US Military, I can think of no valid reason for a civilian to own a weapon that discharges multiple rounds with one depression of the trigger. I realize this is an even broader definition that should be called fully-automatic weapons instead of assault weapons. I also realize there will be a black market for these weapons. I also acknowledge that you don't need automatic weapons to kill people (like Columbine & Virginia Tech) and I'd advocate wider weapons bans, but I don't want to get kicked off OccObs ;).
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6 comments:
Beasty,
Indeed, you have gotten right to the crux of the NRA's opposition to the so-called "assault weapon" ban.
Not one of the weapons that were outlawed in the Clinton ban were weapons that, to use your language, "do not require the user to pull the trigger for each shot." Each and every rifle banned was a semi-automatic that required the trigger to be depressed for each shot.
[This despite the fact that they all look big, bad and scary]
Machine guns and other fully-automatic weapons were already banned by the federal government nationwide long before, as a response to the tommy-gun mayhem of the '20's and '30's.
2 other points:
1. It wouldn't be possible for you to get kicked off this blog: the level of classlessness and irrationality that would be needed is not at your disposal.
2. I disputed SHK's assertion that this nation is under the thumb of the US military. If either of you really believe we're just one bad President or Joint Chief Chairman away from a military junta, I respectfully disagree. This nation has something like 150 million gun owners who would make for an insurmountable level of resistance. Granted the military could inflict untold civilian casualties, but this is the nation whose origins are captured by phrases like "Live free or die" and "Don't tread on me." A lot of liberty-loving Americans would risk everything to keep our children free from a military dictatorship.
I have to somewhat dispute Fredo's point #2. I think if our gov't truly turned bad and had control of the military, America as it exists today is done. The military is not going to have soldiers go door to door for one-on-one fighting. They are going to find hotbeds of resistance, and drop MOABs, missiles, small tactical nukes, etc. and wipe them out to set an example. They could roll tanks through the cities, use their new crowd control microwave technology to push people back, etc. Bomber jets could run non-stop sorties until the will of the people was crushed. The number and type of WMDs available to gov't are overwhelming. They could hole themselves up in underground bunkers and have targeted releases of biochemical weapons to wipe out entire populations if need be to set an example.
To that extent, IMO the greatest defense we have against a tyrannical gov't is no longer weapons, but rather our form of government itself. It seems exceptionally unlikely that enough people sympathetic to a tyrannical cause could infiltrate at all levels: president, Congress, judicial, Pentagon, local law enforcement, etc.
That said, I do think that weapons give the average citizen an excellent form of defense against attacks from his fellow citizens, when law enforcement can't always be there in a timely fashion. So even IF the 2nd amendment were interpreted to be strictly for militias, and strictly to fight a tyranny, I think there would be value in crafting language giving individuals the right to own guns for their own self-defense. I'd agree with keeping the fully-automatic ban in place.
Ordinance like MOABs and tactical nukes are very effective against high concentrations of enemy troops and ordinance. As we have found out in mulitple counter-insurgency theatres, they have a very low utility/cost ratio against guerilla forces. It is not simply our ROE that prevents us from deploying such tactics aainst AQII. We've tried it before against the VC and NVA (see Rolling Thunder), and it tends to be counter-productive. Obliterating thousands, or tens of thousands, of civilians to get to a handful of insurgents tends to place the counter-insurgency force in a worse place than where it started.
If this bizarro-world US military's goal were to rule the country, turning it into a nuclear crater wouldn't give them much of a prize. On the other hand a "targeted" or limited deployment of tactical nukes or MOABS (say, merely turning Nassau County into a wasteland as a warning), would likely just mobilize countless more passive Americans into active resistance.
On the other hand, if their goal were merely to destroy all opposition at any cost, that would be an apocalyptic schenario. God help us all.
But the same could be said of many nuclear armed nations across the globe. That is a scenario that's not worth gaming for, b/c there's only one outcome.
Luckily, even the most ambitious power mongers need to have something to rule.
Ordinance like MOABs and tactical nukes are very effective against high concentrations of enemy troops and ordinance. As we have found out in mulitple counter-insurgency theatres, they have a very low utility/cost ratio against guerilla forces. It is not simply our ROE that prevents us from deploying such tactics aainst AQII. We've tried it before against the VC and NVA (see Rolling Thunder), and it tends to be counter-productive. Obliterating thousands, or tens of thousands, of civilians to get to a handful of insurgents tends to place the counter-insurgency force in a worse place than where it started.
If this bizarro-world US military's goal were to rule the country, turning it into a nuclear crater wouldn't give them much of a prize. On the other hand a "targeted" or limited deployment of tactical nukes or MOABS (say, merely turning Nassau County into a wasteland as a warning), would likely just mobilize countless more passive Americans into active resistance.
On the other hand, if their goal were merely to destroy all opposition at any cost, that would be an apocalyptic schenario. God help us all.
But the same could be said of many nuclear armed nations across the globe. That is a scenario that's not worth gaming for, b/c there's only one outcome.
Luckily, even the most ambitious power mongers need to have something to rule.
As for the assertion that gun ownership is more effective for personal protection than for protection against tyrannical government, I would say the intent of the 2nd amendment is both.
We'll see what the S.C. says at the end of this session when it rules on the D.C. case, but I have a hard time divorcing the 2nd amendment from the rest of the bill of rights, and the rest of the Constitution that Jefferson authored, which was explicitly interested in protecting against too much power being vested centrally.
At the same time, he specifically put in the phrase about the militia, which remember, were merely a group of neighbors with guns who had fought the government into submission.
An armed citizenry is an important impediment to the government's natural tendency to aggregate power at the center.