If piles of dead first-graders didn’t change our national opinion about AR-15s and high-capacity magazines — and they most certainly did not — I don’t think 49 murdered adults in an Orlando nightclub is going to do it, either.
After Sandy Hook, the propagandistic and mouth-foaming NRA went radio silent for days. The hot shot gun blogs mostly held their fire. And across the freedom-loving USA, Second Amendment fundamentalists hunkered down and waited out the very worst of the public blowback to their ugly and indefensible assault-rifle hobby.
They eventually emerged from their bunkers and got back to the important business of buying and selling, making and marketing military-grade weapons for civilian use, and everyone else moved on with newer and fresher hashtag outrages and teapot-tempests. You know the rest.
What’s to think this week’s pantomime votes in Congress will change anything or that the worst mass shooting in American history will move the needle in a “debate” where one side is both implacable and entrenched to the point of fortification?
I’m a gun guy and the black gun scene — the silly “Come and Take It” swagger, the creepy machine-gun fantasy, the grotesque paramilitary overtones and the unavoidable shadings of White Power, white privilege, white fears and power trips — makes me sick. I’ve owned firearms all of my adult life and I’ve been around them since I was a kid. I’ve never owned a gun that held more than a dozen rounds, and I have never felt especially unprepared or outgunned.
But then I’ve never owned guns with the idea that I would use them to shoot other people. The modern gun trade is built around that idea: Shooting other people in preemptive self-defense, shooting other people who are terrorists, shooting other people who are home-invaders and rioters and looters, shooting other people who would strip gun owners of their constitutional rights to maximum firepower. Read the American Rifleman, it’s all right there.
The heat-packing constitutional scholars can say what they want, but our so-called gun culture is a marketing machine — from the industry-financed expansion of concealed-carry laws and the huge growth of handgun sales born of that shift to the relatively recent proliferation of AR-style rifles that invite frequent and expensive customized upgrades and also literally chew through high-priced ammo at the range.
I’m not sure what logical and unemotional and non-absolutist argument can be made in support of the three million or so AR-style rifles floating around the U.S. this morning, but let us give credit where it’s due: These guns are good business and their buyers keep spending money after taking them home. Revolver owners? Lever-action rifle owners? Over-under shotgun owners? Not nearly so much.
The NRA calls the AR-15 “America’s Gun” when what they really mean is that the AR-15 is “America’s Best Profit Center for Gun Makers Outside the Handgun Market.” Which doesn’t have quite the same ring. Another plus for the AR-15 as America’s Gun: It’s iconic and reproduces well for window clings!
There is, of course, a reason the AR-15 is the murder machine of choice for people like Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Syed Farook, Tashfeen Malik, and Omar Mateen. They are highly effective killing tools that even untrained attackers can wield with very deadly effect. They are chambered in a combat round — .223, or in military parlance 5.56 mm — and, except where restricted by law, they feature 30-round magazines from the factory. Aftermarket sellers offer even larger magazines, including 100-round “drum” magazines, which is what Holmes had affixed to his rifled in Aurora, Colorado. Bulk ammunition is widely available and can be bought by mail.
This is all true because we choose to privilege gun ownership and access to firearms above other more humdrum rights, like the pursuit of happiness. (Unless AR-15s make you happy.) Given the fixity of the gun lobby and their reliable one-issue voting base, we are not going to halt the future sale of black guns, nor are we going to kick down any doors to take them back.
But here in Illinois, which was the last state to OK concealed-carry laws, we could apply a little pressure. No more magazines larger than 10 rounds. Grandfather the existing ones under the law but prohibit their transfer. Anyone trafficking in a high-capacity mag loses her FOID card, any dealer doing the same loses his license. And anyone seeking a high-capacity magazine gets a very excruciating background check and a personal interview with some glowering BATF or FBI heavies.
Strong-arming aside, I think we also ought to offer to buy the guns back from people willing to part with them. That’s good public policy. Perhaps they would take that money and buy more and different guns. But maybe a few move on to different hobbies that offer greater personal rewards than building an arsenal.
Here’s a bicycle. Come and take it!
