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September 12, 2005

Assault Weapons

A commenter wrote in reference to Bush:

How can someone claim to be so religious and then at the same time support assault weapons! Hypocracy in it's finest

You know, I have yet to meet someone in favor of banning assault weapons who actually knows what meets the definition of an assault weapon.

First off, “assault weapon” doesn't not mean “machine gun”. Fully automatic weapons have been illegal since 1920. Those are not “assault weapons”. So block that from your mind. Assault weapons have nothing to do with machine guns.

For a weapon to be an assault weapon, it has to have two things:

  • A bayonet mount
  • A large magazine capacity like say 30 rounds

Now I ask you. A bayonet is basically a knife you can stick on the end of your gun so that if you run out of bullets, you can use your gun as a really cumbersome spear. As far as the bayonet goes, are you really worried about people being knifed with guns? Probably not right? I'm sure someone has statistics on it somewhere “number of people stabbed by a gun every year” but you'd have to guess its a really low number. Like maybe one person a decade. Who probably put a knife on their gun, then tripped and fell on it. So banning bayonet mounts seems kind of dumb. What exactly is a bayonet mount anyways? I mean 3 pieces of duct tape would do the job. Are we going to ban duct tape?

So now we're down to the large magazine. Now I really don't get it to be honest. If you didn't hit anything with the first 10 bullets, having 20 extra probably isn't going to help you any. I guess at that point, the bayonet mount makes a lot of sense. But we're talking about banning weapons based on this, so I'll have to turn that around. Would you really be more scared of someone with 30 bullets in his gun then someone with 10? Is someone with a BB gun more scary then someone with a rifle? BB guns hold 100 BBs does that make them more dangerous then a single shot zip gun?

So basically, the only thing scary about assault weapons is their name. Yet our commenter above thinks that because Bush believes in God, he should therefore want to ban assault weapons.

Here's what I think. The assault weapon ban is a bad law. Its a bad law because it doesn't really know what its supposed to be banning. Some guns are “assault weapons” some aren't and they look almost identical. If I duct tape a butter knife to my BB gun does it make it an assault weapon? Probably.

So I'm against the ban, because I'm against laws that don't make sense. Not only am I against the ban, but I'm against anyone who is for the ban, because that means they aren't a serious enough person to look beyond the name “assault weapon”. There's a reason the right to bear arms is the 2nd amendment right after freedom of speech; because the founding fathers thought it was that important. So if you're going to mess with the 2nd most fundamental right we have, you want to tread carefully with eyes wide open. The assault weapons ban tromps forward with eyes blindfolded.

So I don't know about Bush, but I believe in God, and I don't believe in banning assault weapons even though I've never met God and don't own an assault weapon.

Posted by the at September 12, 2005 4:42 PM

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Comments

Christianity and weapons go together like peas and carrots.

Posted by: bitstreamer at December 3, 2005 7:26 AM

Well said. From what I understand, the weenies who put the law together basically went through a catalog, picked out the features that scared them(or that people ‘don’t need’) and ruled “This many scary features makes an assault weapon”. Idiot way to make law.

Such comments about Bush tends to also betray a bad line of thought; they probably also think self-defense is bad because of the ‘turn the other cheek’ thing.

Posted by: Mark at December 3, 2005 9:03 AM

I agree, but believe a more sinister, cynical, and craven approach was taken by the rat-bastard know-nothing weenies like Feinstein and Schumer. They looked around and chose to ban things they thought Other People (like Media Idiots) would be most scared-of/influenced-by, enough so that The Others would do the dirty-work and agree nobody “needed” those things in the semi-arbitrary, out-of-context feature set.

Posted by: -keith in mtn. view at December 5, 2005 12:17 PM