What will we do about guns?
From the Weekly Sift …
Numerous people have called for banning the AR-15 from civilian use. The tricky thing here is getting the definition right: The AR-15 is one of a class of military-style weapons, and if it were banned some other assault rifle would replace it. Banning all assault rifles has been done before, but there’s a legitimate complaint that “assault rifle” is not really a class of weapons — it’s more of a surface description that doesn’t really address the heart of the problem. Vox reported:
It’s quite easy to turn a military-style gun into something that Congress wouldn’t consider an “assault weapon” under its various definitions.
The key issue isn’t whether a weapon looks like something the military would use. It’s how many bullets it’s able to spray out in a short time, how long it can be fired without reloading, and how easy it is to reload over and over without providing a time-window for potential victims to rush the shooter. Those are the features to regulate.
Emotion is a valid motivator: distress, frustration, anger, a sense of futility about our inability to prevent or limit the incidence of mass shootings and about the entrenched opposition of the gun lobby to any sort of increased regulation. But we need to be sensible and practical and informed. This is helpful: focussing regulation on the capability of a particular weapon, because a weapon that can fire many bullets in a short time frame and is easily reloaded — and it is then purely a weapon, not a hunting tool — has no place, absolutely no place, in the hands of civilians.
It is difficult to imagine a scenario where our nation would significantly reduce the sheer number of guns “in circulation,” but I pray that we will find some way to start down that road.