06-10-2013, 03:01 AM
From a former co-author:
-----------------
The Bad Gun Dumpster
By Nicholas J. Johnson*
Law professor
Fordham University
May 30, 2013
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/05/30...-dumpster/
I have a friend who keeps going to the range with me and then
threatening to buy a gun of his own. He has the grudging support of his
wife who got drawn in after a round of clays where she hit more than he did.
She has questions, though. And it has been enlightening for me to talk
about familiar things with an open-minded person who comes at gun issues
basically from what she sees on TV. She was perplexed about many of the
exchanges in the current debate.
She listened patiently to my critique of the bad gun formula of
marginal supply controls as recipe for creeping disarmament. Against
scary looking pictures of AR-15s it didnt really click. But she was
unwilling just to nod and move on. Her need to understand forced me to
work a little harder on the details and to appreciate something I had
lost sight of.
I realized that those of us who focus on these issues sometimes use
rhetorical tools that fail to resonate for folks who are increasingly
lured to think in pictures rather than words. This helped me understand
why the bad gun formula as a slippery slope to full confiscation
argument might not convince some people until you tell the long story
and illustrate it in detail. I thought it might be worth doing that here.
The bad gun formula starts with a perfunctory, I respect the Second
Amendment but . It proceeds from there to describe some subcategory
of bad guns guns to which fantastic characteristics are attributed
(this need not be accurate as long as the labels and images are catchy).
Then it stigmatizes the guns as somehow more gun-like, (i.e., more
dangerous) than others, and impugns the motives or morality of anyone
who would defend such obviously nefarious instruments that no one really
needs.
The claim here is always that no one is talking about taking peoples
guns. (This is what the President said). But the slippery slope to
confiscation worry is vividly illustrated by a long-view examination of
all the different technologies that have at one time or another been
pitched into the bad gun basket. Here goes.
In my last post I dredged up the infamous Saturday Night Special, which
we can stipulate is some slice of handguns. For many years, this was
the quintessential bad gun, endowed with such exceptional capacities
that people would just say the words and figure they had won the point.
For purposes of this exercise lets stipulate the boundaries of this
class, subtract them from the pool of good guns and dump them into the
crush heap.
Next of course is the category of assault weapons which we have
discussed over the last few months ad nauseam. In previous posts I have
shown how this category has no technical boundaries so we again have to
stipulate the boundaries and dump these as well.
There are lots of guns left, of course. But we are just getting started.
Some have almost lost sight of the fact, or for the rising generation
maybe never appreciated, that for most of the history of the modern gun
control movement the evil guns that needed banning were handguns, all of
them. This was the openly avowed goal of the movement starting in the
1970s and continuing until relatively recently. This ambition was
driven by the fact that most gun crime is handgun crime. But handguns
also have clear corresponding self-defense utility and this explains
much of the resistance to the ban handguns movement.
Today, supply controllers who respect the Second Amendment soft peddle
their longstanding disdain for the handgun. Scroll back twenty-five
years though, and you can find many of them playing a much more
aggressive tune. Cutting through the current lip service to the Second
Amendment, for purposes of our counting, the bad gun formula demands we
subtract handguns every last one of them. (Recently at least one
member of congress, Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, openly
acknowledged her ambition to revive the handgun ban agenda and her
belief that the Supreme Courts decisions in Heller and McDonald do not
preclude this. She is clueless on the doctrine. But her candor is
refreshing.)
This still leaves some guns to fill the needs of those whacky
Americans who insist on having one. American huntersthat massive group
of diligent voters, tax payers and prodigious spreaders of currency on
vehicles, clothing, licenses, travel, and equipmentsurely get to keep
their guns, right? Wrong.
Also on the list of bad guns that need banning are civilian sniper
rifles. Defined by the Violence Policy Center as a bolt action or
semi-automatic, having a two-stage trigger, having a free-floated
barrel, having a bull or target barrel or having a fluted barrel.
The bad gun claim here is that [t]he end product of these and other
fine-tuning features, is a precision instrument that is more rugged and
more accurate than its hunting cousins. The Director of the
International Action Network On Small Arms, has urged a more robust
definition, arguing that no civilian should be allowed to have sniper
rifles that are deadly at 100 meters distance.
Now the shelves are really starting to thin. Handguns gone.
Semiautomatic rifles mostly gone. Civilian sniper rifles, deadly at
100 meters (basically every rifle ever made) gone.
Okay, so you can still have a shotgun which evokes class comforting
images of rich people in tweed, stepping out of Range Rovers. But when
we start looking at the shotgun through a careful technical lens
currently so lacking in firearms policy initiatives, it cannot long survive.
There is a hint of this in Robert Sherrills Saturday Night Special,
mentioned in my last post. Sherrill actually acknowledged, with a dose
of hyperbole, the point that is confirmed by the U.S. Army Combat
Shotgun Report. The shotgun is easily more destructive at practical
ranges than many things on the bad gun list. A typical magnum 00
buckshot sends 15 .33 caliber projectiles downrange, in a pattern that
spreads approximately one inch per yard. Sherrill conjured images of
people falling three at a time.
Some might quibble here, raising arguments about the comparative
ballistic coefficients of buckshot versus various rifle rounds as ranges
extend. Indeed I was prepared to have that conversation with members of
the Senate Judiciary Committee. We might have talked about the loads
where shot size is small enough that the shotgun becomes comparatively
less deadly, and then how regulations based on that distinction are
easily circumvented because it is so easy to handload shotgun ammunition.
Walking away from it, I concluded that the players to whom such details
should have mattered, Congress lead players on firearms policy, had
never uttered the words ballistic coefficient or really thought beyond
the first reflex about what they were proposing to regulate. Still, for
purposes of our exercise, one has to expect that someone, at some point,
will start talking about the exceptional multi-projectile danger of
Granddads Model 12 Winchester....
-----------------
The Bad Gun Dumpster
By Nicholas J. Johnson*
Law professor
Fordham University
May 30, 2013
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/05/30...-dumpster/
I have a friend who keeps going to the range with me and then
threatening to buy a gun of his own. He has the grudging support of his
wife who got drawn in after a round of clays where she hit more than he did.
She has questions, though. And it has been enlightening for me to talk
about familiar things with an open-minded person who comes at gun issues
basically from what she sees on TV. She was perplexed about many of the
exchanges in the current debate.
She listened patiently to my critique of the bad gun formula of
marginal supply controls as recipe for creeping disarmament. Against
scary looking pictures of AR-15s it didnt really click. But she was
unwilling just to nod and move on. Her need to understand forced me to
work a little harder on the details and to appreciate something I had
lost sight of.
I realized that those of us who focus on these issues sometimes use
rhetorical tools that fail to resonate for folks who are increasingly
lured to think in pictures rather than words. This helped me understand
why the bad gun formula as a slippery slope to full confiscation
argument might not convince some people until you tell the long story
and illustrate it in detail. I thought it might be worth doing that here.
The bad gun formula starts with a perfunctory, I respect the Second
Amendment but . It proceeds from there to describe some subcategory
of bad guns guns to which fantastic characteristics are attributed
(this need not be accurate as long as the labels and images are catchy).
Then it stigmatizes the guns as somehow more gun-like, (i.e., more
dangerous) than others, and impugns the motives or morality of anyone
who would defend such obviously nefarious instruments that no one really
needs.
The claim here is always that no one is talking about taking peoples
guns. (This is what the President said). But the slippery slope to
confiscation worry is vividly illustrated by a long-view examination of
all the different technologies that have at one time or another been
pitched into the bad gun basket. Here goes.
In my last post I dredged up the infamous Saturday Night Special, which
we can stipulate is some slice of handguns. For many years, this was
the quintessential bad gun, endowed with such exceptional capacities
that people would just say the words and figure they had won the point.
For purposes of this exercise lets stipulate the boundaries of this
class, subtract them from the pool of good guns and dump them into the
crush heap.
Next of course is the category of assault weapons which we have
discussed over the last few months ad nauseam. In previous posts I have
shown how this category has no technical boundaries so we again have to
stipulate the boundaries and dump these as well.
There are lots of guns left, of course. But we are just getting started.
Some have almost lost sight of the fact, or for the rising generation
maybe never appreciated, that for most of the history of the modern gun
control movement the evil guns that needed banning were handguns, all of
them. This was the openly avowed goal of the movement starting in the
1970s and continuing until relatively recently. This ambition was
driven by the fact that most gun crime is handgun crime. But handguns
also have clear corresponding self-defense utility and this explains
much of the resistance to the ban handguns movement.
Today, supply controllers who respect the Second Amendment soft peddle
their longstanding disdain for the handgun. Scroll back twenty-five
years though, and you can find many of them playing a much more
aggressive tune. Cutting through the current lip service to the Second
Amendment, for purposes of our counting, the bad gun formula demands we
subtract handguns every last one of them. (Recently at least one
member of congress, Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois, openly
acknowledged her ambition to revive the handgun ban agenda and her
belief that the Supreme Courts decisions in Heller and McDonald do not
preclude this. She is clueless on the doctrine. But her candor is
refreshing.)
This still leaves some guns to fill the needs of those whacky
Americans who insist on having one. American huntersthat massive group
of diligent voters, tax payers and prodigious spreaders of currency on
vehicles, clothing, licenses, travel, and equipmentsurely get to keep
their guns, right? Wrong.
Also on the list of bad guns that need banning are civilian sniper
rifles. Defined by the Violence Policy Center as a bolt action or
semi-automatic, having a two-stage trigger, having a free-floated
barrel, having a bull or target barrel or having a fluted barrel.
The bad gun claim here is that [t]he end product of these and other
fine-tuning features, is a precision instrument that is more rugged and
more accurate than its hunting cousins. The Director of the
International Action Network On Small Arms, has urged a more robust
definition, arguing that no civilian should be allowed to have sniper
rifles that are deadly at 100 meters distance.
Now the shelves are really starting to thin. Handguns gone.
Semiautomatic rifles mostly gone. Civilian sniper rifles, deadly at
100 meters (basically every rifle ever made) gone.
Okay, so you can still have a shotgun which evokes class comforting
images of rich people in tweed, stepping out of Range Rovers. But when
we start looking at the shotgun through a careful technical lens
currently so lacking in firearms policy initiatives, it cannot long survive.
There is a hint of this in Robert Sherrills Saturday Night Special,
mentioned in my last post. Sherrill actually acknowledged, with a dose
of hyperbole, the point that is confirmed by the U.S. Army Combat
Shotgun Report. The shotgun is easily more destructive at practical
ranges than many things on the bad gun list. A typical magnum 00
buckshot sends 15 .33 caliber projectiles downrange, in a pattern that
spreads approximately one inch per yard. Sherrill conjured images of
people falling three at a time.
Some might quibble here, raising arguments about the comparative
ballistic coefficients of buckshot versus various rifle rounds as ranges
extend. Indeed I was prepared to have that conversation with members of
the Senate Judiciary Committee. We might have talked about the loads
where shot size is small enough that the shotgun becomes comparatively
less deadly, and then how regulations based on that distinction are
easily circumvented because it is so easy to handload shotgun ammunition.
Walking away from it, I concluded that the players to whom such details
should have mattered, Congress lead players on firearms policy, had
never uttered the words ballistic coefficient or really thought beyond
the first reflex about what they were proposing to regulate. Still, for
purposes of our exercise, one has to expect that someone, at some point,
will start talking about the exceptional multi-projectile danger of
Granddads Model 12 Winchester....