For how long now have we been told that the banning of assault-style weapons would lead to losing ALL of our guns? It’s the “nose of the camel in the tent” threat, right? Scary stuff, the awful Democrats, if elected, will be coming for our guns. Good friends and neighbors of mine at Potlatch have voiced this fear to me. These are country people who, like me, have shotguns and rifles as part of their culture. They shoot predators and hunt deer. They don’t wield AK-47s and engage in gun violence.
As I wrote recently, we continue to kick the can down the road instead of tackling big issues. We continue to be hostage to the NRA crowd and those driven by the “culture wars” and politics. Electing the “right” people and spreading falsehoods apparently trumps public safety and common sense.
Paradoxically, this scenario plays out in the face of the fact that most gun owners and others have no problem with reasonable regulation of guns and gun ownership. The problem is clearly in Congress where a minority of the leadership has the leverage and the votes to block gun legislation. By doing nothing they keep getting reelected and retain their power over the rest of us. The “nose of the camel” analogy has served them well; if you ban military type weapons it follows that the government will come for your shotguns! It just makes sense, right? Except it doesn’t.
The Second Amendment does not sanctify gun rights as being absolute. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) the Supreme Court affirmed the right of individuals to keep handguns in the home for self-defense but clearly signaled that gun rights, however, were not unlimited. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote ”Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. [It is] not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” The decision went on to cite “presumptively lawful laws” that prohibited firearm possessions by dangerous people, forbidding guns in schools and government buildings and imposing conditions on commercial sales of firearms.
It is interesting that in 1939 the Supreme Court in United States v. Miller upheld the regulation of sawed-off shotguns which, it might be argued, were the AR-15s of their time, and one of the favorite weapons of bank robbers and criminals. These and machine guns have been regulated at the federal level since the 1930s partly as a result of the infamous St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago in 1929. All of this is a way of saying that we have long recognized the need to regulate and police certain types of weapons for the public good. And in doing so there has never been an attempt to seize the guns of farmers, ranchers, home owners and others who act responsibly.
It is long overdue to do something to reduce the spiraling gun violence and mass killings. We need to try something and it is perfectly reasonable and prudent to require universal background checks for gun ownership and to ban the sale of semi-automatic military style rifles as well as excessive clips and magazines. We know that this action alone will not solve all the atrocities and abuses brought on by people intent on doing evil, but it might help. We need to do something rather than nothing.
*See The Positive Second Amendment by Darrell A.H. Miller and Joseph Blocher (2018) for the best up-to-date and comprehensive account of the history, theory and law about gun ownership
In my 15 May 2020 response to your posting of the same date entitled “Guns,” I cited no less than three dozen examples of statements by anti-gun proponents expressing a desire to eliminate, ban or confiscate guns. We all know what their endgame is. So, it would seem the fears of your “good friends and neighbors” are not entirely unjustified.
While the “nose of the camel” metaphor is apt with regard to the issue of gun control, perhaps a more appropriate one is the “slippery slope” metaphor posited by Eugene Volokh in the Harvard Law Review [Vol. 116 Harv. L. Rev. 2002-2003]. I have taken the liberty of including part of his discourse, below.
THE MECHANISMS OF THE SLIPPERY SLOPE – Eugene Volokh
“Though the metaphor of the slippery slope suggests that there’s one fundamental mechanism through which the slippage happens, there are actually many different ways that decision A can make decision B more likely. Many of these ways have little to do with the mechanisms that people often think of when they hear the phrase “slippery slope”: development by analogy, by changes in people’s moral or empirical attitudes, or by “desensitization” of people to earlier decisions.
To illustrate this briefly, consider the claim that gun registration (A) might lead to gun confiscation (B). Setting aside whether we think this slippery slope is likely – and whether it might actually be desirable – it turns out that the slope might happen through many different mechanisms, or combinations of mechanisms:
a. Registration may change people’s attitudes about the propriety of confiscation, by making them view gun possession not as a right but as a privilege that the government grants and therefore may deny.
b. Registration may be seen as a small enough change that people will reasonably ignore it (“I’m too busy to worry about little things like this”), but when aggregated with a sequence of other small changes, registration might ultimately lead to confiscation or something close to it.
c. The enactment of registration requirements may create political momentum in favor of gun control supporters, thus making it easier for them to persuade legislators to enact confiscation.
d. People who don’t own guns are more likely than gun owners to support confiscation.’ If registration is onerous enough, over time it may discourage some people from buying guns, thus de creasing the fraction of the public that owns guns, decreasing the political power of the gun-owning voting bloc, and therefore increasing the likelihood that confiscation will become politically feasible.
e. Registration may lower the cost of confiscation – since the government would know which people’s houses to search if the residents don’t turn in their guns voluntarily – and thus make confiscation more appealing to some voters.
f. Registration may trigger the operation of another legal rule that makes confiscation easier and thus more cost-effective: if guns weren’t registered, confiscation would be largely unenforceable, since house-to-house searches to find guns would violate the Fourth Amendment; but if guns are registered some years before confiscation is enacted, the registration database might provide probable cause to search the houses of all registered gun owners.”
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To employ another metaphor, what the anti-gun side is employing is the “death by a thousand cuts” strategy. As the “We need to try something” measures eventually prove ineffective, additional remedies (already drafted and in their “back pockets”) will be implemented. For example, most of the current crop of gun control proposals call for a 10-round limit on magazine capacity. The backers of those measures already know that such restrictions will not have any appreciable effects on crime or violence. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is an example of how little difference magazine restrictions make.
The Parkland shooter fired 150 rounds over the course of about seven minutes, reportedly using 10‐round magazines that would be compliant with almost every current and proposed magazine restriction. Now clearly, the next step would be to limit magazine size further, say to 5 rounds, and so on to elimination of detachable magazines altogether.
Note: The Parkland shooter was on the FBI’s radar. Numerous calls to the Bureau were not adequately addressed. The Sutherland Springs shooter should have been barred from gun ownership as a result of a domestic assault. The Aurora, Colorado theater shooter exhibited numerous troubling behaviors before his homicidal massacre of defenseless movie-goers. All three cases involved serious failures of institutions that no gun laws would have prevented.
If the left is genuinely concerned about gun violence, why is the southern border crisis being downplayed? Federal agents tell us that scores of criminals, gang members and their contraband are pouring into the country. Drugs, a major contributor to urban killings, are likewise flooding the country through unprotected zones along the border. Weapons, including those of mass destruction, could be readily smuggled into the country.
In the interest of brevity, I’ll refer you and your readers to my 15 May 2020 missive for further comments on causes and potential remedies for gun violence.