A Virginia ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban Will Fail Just As Every Other Gun Ban in the Nation Has

By Mark

With Democrats taking over control of government in Virginia after the November elections, it became clear that one of the first priorities of the Spanberger administration and the general assembly would be to enact sweeping gun control laws. As the sun rises in the east, an “assault weapons” ban bill was recently introduced and there’s a very real possibility of it becoming law and the fact that similar bans have consistently failed at the federal and local levels apparently doesn’t matter.

The central and most problematic targets of AWBs are semiautomatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and magazines with a capacity of greater than ten rounds. Common handguns (provided they are not equipped with the aforementioned magazines, or with dubiously maligned features like barrel shrouds or threaded barrels) are generally not targeted by AWB prohibitions.

The exclusion of most handguns from AWBs is intentional, as AWB advocates know that broad handgun bans are unpopular and, per several rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, illegal.

Rifles of any sort, let alone the subgroup deemed “assault weapons,” are used very rarely to commit homicide. Criminal gun violence is almost exclusively a handgun phenomenon.

And even gun control advocates’ own research couldn’t find any “association between homicide rates and assault weapons bans (or) large capacity ammunition magazine bans.” That’s not surprising: the average number of shots fired in both nonfatal and fatal shootings is far fewer than ten. Statistically speaking, there’s scarcely any criminal gun-related violence in which magazine capacity is relevant.

One may be tempted to think of “mass shootings” as an especially dangerous and devastating subcategory of criminal violence worthy of particular attention in the AWB discussion. On the contrary, gun control groups themselves acknowledge that mass shootings (even if you use a broad definition of that term) constitute a tiny fraction of gun homicides and a tinier-still fraction of gun deaths (since the vast majority of gun deaths are suicides). Over 90% of homicide incidents involve only one victim. The pervasive misunderstanding that American gun violence is substantially characterized by mass shootings leads to absurd public policy ideas.

Insofar as mass shootings do happen, note the morbid but undeniable fact that killing defenseless people, by definition, does not require “special” weaponry. Consider some of the most prominent mass shootings in American history: The Virginia Tech shooting was carried out with unremarkable handguns. The Parkland shooter used ten-round magazines. The nature of the weapon is practically immaterial in a context of helpless victims.

So there’s no plausible rationale for believing that AWBs will curb violence, even if we make absurdly charitable assumptions about their efficacy in restricting the availability of certain types of weapons. In reality, low efficacy is much more likely: it’s hard to imagine a homicidal person complying with laws pertaining to the ergonomic or mechanical features of a weapon he might use, and meaningful enforcement action against such criminals is doubtful in an environment where millions of such guns are already in widespread legal circulation.

Finally, while AWBs don’t restrict the guns that are used most often in criminal activity, the guns they do restrict —  semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines —are among the most common and popular firearms owned by ordinary, peaceable Americans. Moreover, a significant majority of the billion magazines produced in the past few decades hold more than ten rounds. In fact, “high capacity” magazines are actually just standard capacity magazines, in widespread, common use for a wide range of lawful purposes.

In the end, intentionally or not, who is most affected by AWBs? Who do these laws hurt? Who risks having their lives ruined by the new class of criminality created by AWB statutes? Not the tiny minority of people who are responsible for the vast majority of violent crime, people for whom one more criminal charge means nothing. Instead, the burden falls on the great multitude of ordinary, law-abiding Americans gun owners.

That’s not acceptable. And one has to wonder: was that the point of it? Hurting ordinary people who exist as deplorable caricatures in politicians’ minds?

It’s hard not to conclude that these politicians, the ones advocating AWBs, are ignorant of the data. They’re flailing, trying to show they’re doing something, enacting some kind of gun control, any kind of gun control that they can get away with, however useless or counterproductive it might be in practice.

I suspect, however, the reality is worse. They push these laws to demonstrate their commitment to the political left’s orthodoxy, to work toward eventually achieving total civilian disarmament, and simply to give people they don’t like politically and culturally “a bad day,” regardless of the data. It’s utterly shameful.