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As the war winds down, President Bush turns his eye to the home front. Looking ahead to the 2004 election, he has tried to put his boots on the middle ground of the gun control debate. Bush has come out in favor of continuing the onerous 1994 federal ban on so-called assault weapons, which is set to expire just before the election. Bad move.
In 1994 Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her Clintonian gun-control allies scared the public into believing their new gun ban would cut crime. It didn't. The subsequent drop in violent crime has more to do with better policing, abatement of the crack cocaine wars, and longer prison sentences for career felons. No one has credibly attributed the decrease in crime to the assault-weapon ban.
But the assault-weapon ban was never about crime. Feinstein disclosed her real motive in a "60 Minutes" interview several months after the ban became law: "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking every one of them—Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in—I would have done it." Such flimflammery is why gun owners are reluctant to compromise on gun legislation.
Americans today are more sophisticated about guns. New concerns for homeland security have deflated old canards about who "really needs" a gun. Lots of people need them, if post-9/11 sales are any clue. And more soccer moms than ever are stepping up to the firing line, as the new NRA magazine Woman's Outlook suggests. Fox News Channel's Wendy McElroy recently observed that women are a fast-growing segment of the gun-owning public. Their numbers have increased in the military and in civilian firearm training classes. A newfound knowledge of firearms will immunize many more citizens against the scare tactics of Feinstein and her ilk this time around.
In the 1990s gun-control activists whipped up a panic about assault weapons being the criminal's weapon of choice. Numerous studies showed then, as now, that criminals instead prefer small, good quality handguns. Nevertheless, law-abiding Americans who for decades had owned semiautomatic rifles for hunting and target shooting were now informed by gun control activists that their rifles had suddenly become dangerous. The activists did a bait-and-switch job on the public, encouraging the misperception that assault weapons are the same as machine guns.
So what exactly is an assault weapon? The name itself is a fraud, contrived by activists to include any firearm with certain scary-looking but harmless design features. A detachable magazine, a pistol-type grip, an attachment on the barrel to suppress aim-spoiling muzzle flash, and a threaded barrel are characteristics that supposedly turn a regular hunting or target rifle into a deadly assault weapon. Of course, none of these cosmetic features enhance a gun's lethality one bit. But they impart a sinister military look that can be exploited by unscrupulous politicians to scare people who are unfamiliar with guns.
The guns deceptively misnamed assault weapons can fire only one bullet with each pull of the trigger. They are definitely not machine guns, which have been all but outlawed for nearly 70 years. They include many guns owned by collectors, hobbyists, and hunters.
As if the 1994 federal ban weren't enough, several states jumped in with their own bans, complete with supporting propaganda. For example, in August 1997 the Los Angeles Times ran a series of articles just as California's legislature considered making that state's ban even more restrictive. One of the articles featured machine guns, falsely implying that the proposed California law would ban machine guns instead of common rifles that hobbyists and hunters had legally owned for years. California gun owners found out too late that the new law was so complicated that even California's attorney general couldn't tell which guns were illegal. Many learned firsthand how gun registration leads to confiscation. Police used registration lists to target owners for prosecution unless they turned in their newly outlawed guns.
The cynical tactics of gun-control activists were just as evident for the federal ban. A September 15, 1994 Washington Post editorial summed it up: "No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished [by the assault weapon ban]. Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control."
Those who now clamor for legislation to resuscitate the dying 1994 assault weapon ban still aren't looking for criminals. No one believes that any more. Mr. and Mrs. America, they're coming after you.
