What Will Gun Controllers Do When Americans Ignore an ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban?
21st June 2016
Prohibition was kneecapped by Americans’ widespread refusal to stop producing, selling, and drinking booze. Millions of Americans smoked marijuana decades before majority sentiment creeped toward legalizing the stuff. Gays and lesbians not only surreptitiously lived and loved when they were targeted by the law—they also famously (and righteously) stomped cops who raided the Stonewall Inn, ultimately precipitating liberalization. And restrictions on exporting encryption were eased only after cryptographers illegally exported code—even printing it on T-shirts as an act of civil disobedience.
Those who have a touchingly naive faith in the power of government cling to the conviction that Passing A Law will solve a problem, automagically. If that were true, then there wouldn’t be a War on Drugs.
“Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense,” President Obama tut-tutted last week. But the moralizer-in-chief failed to make sense himself, calling for the outlawing of a category of devices that doesn’t really exist.
The failure of Obama to actually connect with reality is almost universal.
That gun owners mean what they say in the “assault weapons” context can be inferred from the 5 percent compliance rate achieved by New York’s recent registration requirement for such firearms. Or from the 15 percent compliance rate in neighboring Connecticut.
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When New Jersey went a step further and banned the sale and possession of “assault weapons,” 947 people registered their rifles as sporting guns for target shooting, 888 rendered them inoperable, and four surrendered them to the police. That’s out of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 firearms affected by the law. The New York Times concluded, a bit drily, “More than a year after New Jersey imposed the toughest assault-weapons law in the country, the law is proving difficult if not impossible to enforce.”