The more I hear, the more I think we need not only need a conversation about guns and mental health, but we probably ought to learn more about what we are talking about before we go around maligning them. In the last couple days, I’ve heard people in the news attack “semi-automatic” weapons (newsflash: almost every single gun in the world is a semi-automatic weapon–it just means that after you fire a round, a new round is pushed into the cylinder so you can fire another round) and “assault” rifles, a term that didn’t really exist until the mid-1980s and which creation only served to popularize the Bushmaster.
If you read nothing else, you should set aside a few minutes and read author Larry Correia’s (see a review of his first book, a best seller, here) two-bits. A former gun store owner and a Utah Concealed and Carry Weapon permit trainer, he provides some interesting insights to the debate. He says that
It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I’ve heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I’ve spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don’t mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can’t stand).
Today’s blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I’ve heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.
So if you’re willing to step past your ignorance (the wise man will humbly do it every day) and learn something, click on over to his post and read.
Among the other things I learned, or that I thought were insightful:
- There are actually quite a few regulations in place right now. Most of what has been, and will be, proposed is not effective at deterring crime and homicide.
- Compare to the about 10,000 homicides in America each year, about 2.5 million crimes are stopped by a person with a gun.
- Mass shootings where a civilian confronts the shooter have substantially fewer deaths than shootings where police stop the shooter.
- Only the Giffords shooting did not occur in a Gun Free Zone.
- Assault rifles aren’t really assault rifles, and are notoriously difficult to define and regulate.
- Chicago, a Gun Free city, has nearly 600 homicides a year.
- During the years of the “assault weapons ban,” criminals continued to use assault weapons.
English: New York Times Bestseller Larry Correia at WorldCon 69: Renovation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Among his more interesting suggestions is that we arm teachers, something that may already be happening in Utah. Correia explains:
Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. After Colombine law enforcement changed their methods in dealing with active shooters. It used to be that you took up a perimeter and waited for overwhelming force before going in. Now usually as soon as you have two officers on scene you go in to confront the shooter (often one in rural areas or if help is going to take another minute, because there are a lot of very sound tactical reasons for using two, mostly because your success/survival rates jump dramatically when you put two guys through a door at once. The shooter’s brain takes a moment to decide between targets). The reason they go fast is because they know that every second counts. The longer the shooter has to operate, the more innocents die.
However, cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. They simply can’t teleport. So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back.
So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do?
The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
The teachers are there already. The school staff is there already. Their reaction time is measured in seconds, not minutes. They can serve as your immediate violent response. Best case scenario, they engage and stop the attacker, or it bursts his fantasy bubble and he commits suicide. Worst case scenario, the armed staff provides a distraction, and while he’s concentrating on killing them, he’s not killing more children.
But teachers aren’t as trained as police officers! True, yet totally irrelevant. The teacher doesn’t need to be a SWAT cop or Navy SEAL. They need to be speed bumps.
As they say, “when it’s life or death, the police are only six minutes away.”
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To whom it concerns, Assault Weapon has selective fire and is already illegal to own without a permit which was pushed for passage years ago by the NRA. The AR15 which is semiautomatic only is flat out not an assault rifle. GET IT STRAIGHT FOLKS!
http://publiusonline.com/2012/12/a-brief-history-of-the-second-amendment-in-the-supreme-court-contributor/
A brief history of the Second Amendment in the Supreme Court
December 22, 2012 By Mitch F. 3 Comments
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Congress is again considering an “assault weapons ban.” The call is for compromise, reasonable restrictions and common sense gun control. I could go on a lengthy diatribe that was comprehensive in nature regarding the proposed legislation, but others have already responded thoroughly.
Owing to the nature of this blog, I will instead offer a perspective taken from previous court opinions that may be relevant to the proposal.
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Our journey begins with the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. The law imposed a tax on machine guns, short barreled rifles and shotguns, sound suppression devices and other destructive devices.
The NFA was challenged before the Supreme Court in 1939. Jack Miller and Frank Layton had transported a double barrel shotgun with a barrel length less than 18 inches from Oklahoma to Arkansas. The firearm was not registered nor was there a tax stamp affixed order for the gun as defined by the NFA. The District Court struck down the NFA on Second Amendment grounds. On hearing the case (United States v. Miller) the Supreme Court overturned the lower court and held the NFA to not violate the Second Amendment.
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The primary reasoning of the Court was that automatic weapons and short-barreled weapons bore no relation to the needs of the common infantryman at the time.
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From the ruling: In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense.
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Further, the Court found “that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense… And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time.”
In subsequent references to Miller (of which there are seven), the Court has repeatedly held this basic principle. The Second Amendment protects the right of the people to possess those guns that would be used by infantryman to defend our freedom.
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There have been challenges to the nature of the right Miller defined. United States v. Warin and United States v. Oakes are most prominent. The Court’s rulings had painted a picture where the Second Amendment was meaningless. Under the rulings of Miller, Warin and to notes in Oakes, the Court protected neither a right to keep arms for personal defense nor a right to keep arms to be used in a citizen militia. I am hard pressed to understand what exactly the Second Amendment was protecting in the years leading up to 2008.
In 2008 the Second Amendment received its first direct review since Miller. District of Columbia v. Heller challenged the District of Columbia’s handgun ban. The Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to guns for self defense within the home and within federal enclaves.
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Heller, however, left the question of incorporation open. This was settled two years later in McDonald v. City of Chicago when the Court extended the individual right to all citizens of the United States via the Due Process clause. The ruling struck down the Chicago gun ban and cleared the confusion regarding Heller’s application to the states.
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Taken together, we see that the court has held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right (Heller) of all citizens (McDonald) to guns relevant to self defense (Heller) or guns that bear a relation to individual service in the militia at a given time (Miller).
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AR-15
At the time of Miller, the official primary infantry arm was the United States Rifle, Cal. 30 M1, commonly known as the M1 Garand. This gun had an 8 round magazine and was a gas operated semi-automatic action. That is, for each time the trigger is depressed, one round (shot) is fired. While officially adopted in 1936, it was not fully deployed until 1941. Many soldiers at the time of Miller were still issued the 1903 Springfield bolt-action rifle. Both of these guns sported barrels in excess of 22″ of length.
Today, the modern infantryman is equipped with M4, which is a derivative
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M249
of the M16/AR-15 line of guns. The M4 is a carbine with an overall length of 33 inches and a barrel length of 14.5 inches. The stock is adjustable for length, it is issued with a 30 round detachable box magazine and a flash hider. The gun has three fire control modes: safe, semi-automatic and 3-round burst. The M4A1 which is issued to certain squads has a different trigger pack: safe, semi-automatic and fully automatic. In addition, in a ten-man squad, you will see two men equipped with M249 Squad Automatic Weapons System, a light machine gun. General officers, medics, and other non-combat personnel in a combat zone are issued a Beretta M9, a high-capacity 9mm semi-automatic handgun for personal defense.
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If the description modern infantry guns sounds familiar, it should. They are the very weapons at the top of the list that certain members of congress want to ban. But, they are also the very guns called out by the philosophy of Miller, as protected by the Second Amendment.