CPRC at National Review: “A Semi-Automatic Handgun Ban Wouldn’t Stop Mass Shooters”

Jan 20, 2016 | Featured

 

John Lott’s newest piece at National Review starts this way:

President Obama’s timing is off. Just as he tries to assure us that there’s no conspiracy to take away our guns, Democrats across the country are calling for banning most firearms.

From Georgia to California, Democratic legislators have introduced bills to ban all semi-automatic rifles or even all semi-automatics, period. In the New York Times this month, Thomas Friedman called for “bans on the manufacture and sale of all semi-automatic and other military-style guns.” The city council of Lexington, Mass., is seeking to “ban the ownership of semi-automatic or fully automatic weapons able to hold ammunition clips containing more than ten rounds.”

Well over half of the guns sold in the U.S. are semi-automatic. And, if a gun can accept a magazine, that magazine can be of pretty much any size. So the “ten round” rule is meaningless. So, with the exception of a few specialty guns, these rules would in effect ban all semi-automatic guns.

This Democrat goal is nothing new, of course — in 1998, Illinois state senator Barack Obama supported a “ban on the sale or transfer of all forms of semi-automatic weapons” — but for years, gun-control advocates wanted to ban guns based on appearances. Now, instead of arbitrarily going after guns because of how they look, Democrats are at least being logically consistent and talking about banning guns based on how they function.

The AR-15 became a popular target because it resembles the military’s M-16. But AR-15s use essentially the same bullets as do small-game hunting rifles. They even fire at the same rapidity and cause the same damage. And unlike fully automatic machine guns, which will fire bullets for as long as the trigger is pressed, semi-automatic guns fire only one bullet per trigger-pull. No self-respecting military in the world would use these semi-automatic guns. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

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