Assault Weapons Ban Ineffective and Arbitrary

To the editors:

The editorial on Sept. 13 (“An Assault on Democracy,”) laments the Assault Weapons Ban’s expiration as though the law actually had practical effects other than to annoy gun owners. However, Senate Majority Leader Tom Delay, R.-Texas was right to deride the ban as a meaningless “feel-good piece of legislation” whic bans some guns while keeping other, equally lethal guns legal and restricts freedom without promoting safety.

The Crimson Staff notes that the ban prohibits a few “assault rifles,” such as the Uzi, by name. However, gun manufacturers continue to manufacture substantially the same weapons under new names with cosmetic changes. For example, the ban prohibited the Colt AR-15, thus spawning the similarly-featured but differently-named Bushmaster 15 AR.

The ban’s list of prohibited features is even sillier. It defines an “assault rifle” as any semi-automatic rifle with a detachable magazine and at least two of: “a folding or telescoping stock; a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon; a bayonet mount; a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor; and a grenade launcher.”

So some guns prohibited by the ban could be made legal by eliminating their folding stocks, thus making them less convenient to transport and store but no less deadly. This is akin to allowing umbrellas but prohibiting folding umbrellas. With the exception of a grenade launcher, none of these features substantially increases a weapon’s deadliness; and civilians are already prohibited from owning grenades by the National Firearms Act of 1934. What these five features have in common is not that they are deadly but that they make rifles look more imposing and “assaulty,” especially to those who have never fired one.

The ban’s bizarre and ineffective classification of assault weapons led Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center, a leading gun control advocacy group, to tell NPR this March: “If the existing assault weapons ban expires, I personally do not believe it will make one whit of difference one way or another in terms of our objective, which is reducing death and injury and getting a particularly lethal class of firearms off the streets.  So if it doesn’t pass, it doesn’t pass.”

Last summer, I had the opportunity to shoot a post-ban AR-15 knockoff. (It was a lot of fun, by the way.)  If I had decided to go on a shooting rampage—which I did not feel like doing—the federal government’s insistence that the gun lack a bayonet mount would not have hampered me substantially. Indeed, my biggest obstacle would have been the oldest form of gun control: the fact that those around me on the shooting range also had guns with which to defend themselves.

JOSHUA A. BARRO ’05