Part 1
March 1, 1996
THE ASSAULT-WEAPONS SCAM
by James Bovard
The 1994 federal assault-weapons ban could be the first step towards legislation leading to the confiscation of tens of millions of private rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Though the bill Clinton signed purportedly targets only “assault weapons,” the loose definitions and expansive goals of the antigun lobby will almost certainly lead to a vast expansion of weapons to be seized. And, as the experience of several states and New York City shows, the destruction of the Second Amendment via political demagoguery has already progressed much further than most Americans realize.
In recent years, four states and numerous cities and counties have banned or severely restricted the ownership of assault weapons. According to the Defense Department, an assault weapon is a rifle that is capable of both automatic (machine gun) fire and semiautomatic (one shot per trigger pull) fire. But most of the media implicitly defines “assault weapon” as any “politically incorrect rifle.” Most bans focus on semiautomatic rifles, and media coverage routinely confuses semiautomatic with automatic machine guns, ownership of which has been severely restricted by the federal government since 1934. A study by David Kopel of Denver’s Independence Institute noted:
“American civilians have owned semiautomatics since the 1890s, and currently an estimated twenty to thirty million own the firearms covered by the broader definitions of ‘assault weapon.'”
As a result of muddled definitions of assault weapons, bans on such guns have been extremely arbitrary. California in 1989 banned the sale or transfer of assault weapons and required all existing owners to register their guns. The California law was very poorly drafted California Attorney General Dan Lungren later admitted that some of the gun models specifically banned by the California legislature did not exist. San Francisco lawyer Don Kates suggested that legislators, in compiling the list of prohibited guns, appeared to have selected from “some picture book . . . of mislabeled firearms they thought looked evil.” The Los Angeles Timesnoted:
“Asked what action a police officer should take in dealing with an apparently illegal but misidentified gun, Lungren’s press secretary, Dave Puglia, said local authorities ‘are going to have to use their discretion.'”
Thus, since the state legislature made a mess of the statute, local officials should have the arbitrary power to pick and choose which guns to ban and which gun owners to arrest and imprison.
The vast majority of Californians did not register their guns; thus, the law may have created as many as 300,000 new criminals. In numerous cases, police carrying out searches of people’s homes have seized weapons they allege to be illegal assault weapons and then refused to return them even after receiving proof that the guns are not legally banned under California law. The assault-weapons ban was enacted after politicians claimed that such guns were a grave public menace. But Torrey Johnson of the California Bureau of Forensic Services concluded in a confidential report:
“It is obvious to those of us in the state crime lab system that the presumption that [assault weapons] constitute a major threat in California is absolutely wrong.”
In 1989, the Denver city council banned Denver residents from owning or selling so-called assault weapons. (Residents could apply for police permission to continue possessing weapons obtained prior to the date of the ban.) Denver even banned residents from using assault weapons for self-defense in their own homes as if government officials were seeking to prevent citizens from having an unfair advantage against burglars or rapists who break into their homes. In February 1993, a local court struck down the law as unconstitutionally vague and a violation of the state constitution.
New Jersey in 1990 banned ownership of so-called assault rifles. Governor Jim Florio declaimed: “There are some weapons that are just so dangerous that society has a right and the obligation even to take those weapons out of circulation.” President Clinton considers the New Jersey law a model for the nation, declaring last October: “We need a national law to do what New Jersey has done here with assault weapons.” But the ban was so extensive that even some models of BB guns were outlawed. Owners of the restricted guns were required to surrender them to the police, sell them to a licensed dealer, or render the guns inoperable. Yet, Ira Marlowe of the Coalition for New Jersey Sportsmen reported that “there was not one murder . . . with a semiautomatic assault weapon” in New Jersey in 1989, the year before the ban took effect. Joseph Constance, deputy chief of the Trenton, New Jersey, Police Department, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 1993:
“Since police started keeping statistics, we now know that assault weapons are/were used in an underwhelming .026 of 1 percent of crimes in New Jersey. This means that my officers are more likely to confront an escaped tiger from the local zoo than to confront an assault rifle in the hands of a drug-crazed killer on the streets.”
New Jersey had an estimated 300,000 owners of “assault weapons,” each potentially facing up to five years in prison for violating the state law.
New York City required rifle owners to register their guns in 1967; city council members at that time promised that the registration lists would not be used for a general confiscation of law-abiding citizens’ weapons. Roughly one million New Yorkers were obliged to register with police.The New York Times editorialized on September 26, 1967:
“No sportsman should object to a city law that makes it mandatory to obtain a license from the Police Department and to register rifles. . . . Carefully drawn local legislation would protect the constitutional rights of owners and buyers. The purpose of registration would be not to prohibit but to control dangerous weapons.”
In 1991, New York City Mayor David Dinkins railroaded a bill through the city council banning possession of many semiautomatic rifles, claiming that they were actually assault weapons. Scores of thousands of residents who had registered in 1967 and scrupulously obeyed the law were stripped of their right to own their guns. Police are now using the registration lists to crack down on gun owners; police have sent out threatening letters, and policemen have gone door-to-door demanding that people surrender their guns, according to Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer and author of two books on gun control.
Dinkins sold his gun ban largely by appealing to public fear of crime. Yet, New York City Police Commissioner (and now President Clinton’s drug czar) Lee Brown, when questioned by city council members, first claimed to have scores of examples of criminal abuses of registered rifles in the preceding decades.
Halbrook notes that the New York ban “prohibits so many guns that they don’t even know how many are prohibited” and that the law is so vague that the city police “arbitrarily apply it to almost any gun owner.” Jerold Levine, counsel to the New York Rifle Association, observed: “Tens of thousands of New York veterans who kept their rifles from World War II or the Korean War have been turned into felons as a result of this law. Even the puny target-shooting guns in Coney Island arcades have been banned under the new law because their magazines hold more than five rounds.” The motto of New York gun owners fighting the proposal was: “We Complied, They Lied.” Jerry Preiser, president of the Federation of New York State Rifle and Pistol Clubs, declared that the mayor’s and city council’s acts “only show that New York City’s leaders are like repeat sex offenders . . . they can never be trusted!”
The bans on assault weapons are products of political hysteria rather than a public safety campaign. A 1990 Florida state commission estimated that “only one-tenth of one percent of the guns used in crimes were so-called ‘assault weapons.'” The FBI Uniform Crime Reports indicated that rifles of all kinds account for only four percent of the nation’s homicides, and the number of homicides committed with rifles has fallen sharply in the last decade. William Poole, an Arizona public policy expert, observed: “This whole issue of identifying so-called ‘bad firearms’ is the intellectual equivalent of counting beer cans along the road and banning the most popular brands.”
Many local and state assault-weapons laws, as well as the federal law, contain provisions apparently written by people spooked after watching too many Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. The federal law bans guns that have grenade-launcher and bayonet-mount attachments. But neither the U.S. Justice Department nor the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms could provide a single example of either grenade launchers or bayonets attached to assault weapons being used in any violent crime in the United States. (Grenade launchers were used by the FBI in their final assault in Waco, but the FBI would not be affected by the bill.)
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/assaultweapons-scam-part-1/
Part 2
April 1, 1996
THE ASSAULT-WEAPONS SCAM
by James Bovard
The federal assault-weapons ban is widely perceived as a foot in the door to far more extensive gun bans. When a Christian Science Monitor reporter asked Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the lead sponsor of the bill, why her amendment did not ban all semiautomatic guns, Feinstein replied: “We couldn’t have gotten it through Congress.” Democratic Representative Charles Schumer of New York, declared: “We’ll be carrying the Feinstein banner in the House when it comes to semiautomatic weapons.”
If all semiautomatic guns were banned, the federal government would confiscate up to thirty-five million weapons. The Clinton administration has tentatively embraced a proposal to require all gun owners to be licensed which could be a prelude to the type of gun confiscations ongoing in New York City.
Some of the rationales offered for banning assault weapons were almost comical. Senator Feinstein declared that assault weapons should be banned because they can fire many rounds “within seconds and without warning.” Perhaps Senator Feinstein thinks that guns should be equipped with an official warning notice, such as a tape recording, announcing before firing: “Warning: Redneck May Pull Trigger in Five Seconds.” Complaining that guns fire “without warning” makes as much sense as complaining that politicians talk before thinking.
The 1994 attack on assault weapons often showed the emotional fervor of an old-time gospel revival show. (President Clinton told a Washington church audience last August that it was “the will of God” that Congress approve his crime bill.) Yet, as with most holy wars, some of the warriors are not without the taint of hypocrisy. Senator John Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, was a fervent supporter of the crime bill and the assault-weapons ban. A few days after the bill had passed the Senate, the Charleston (West Virginia) Daily Mail reported from Washington:
“If burglars are casing big houses around here, they may want to give wide berth to the Rockefeller mansion. The occupant is packing heat and knows how to use it. Senator Jay Rockefeller disclosed that for the past 25 years, he has been the proud owner of a Colt AR-15, a so-called assault weapon used in Vietnam. Rockefeller keeps the rifle in his Washington home.”
This was news to the Washington police, which ban the ownership of AR-15s in the District of Columbia. After Rockefeller was told that having such a gun in the District was a crime, he “remembered” that he actually kept the gun stored in northern Virginia. Rockefeller also claimed that he was unaware that the District of Columbia banned such guns. Rockefeller has private security guards around his lavish Washington home, and the Senate office buildings where he works are heavily guarded by well-fed Capitol policemen. Yet he still feels entitled to own a gun that he wanted to severely restrict other Americans from being able to purchase.
The assault-weapons ban, as it now stands, is based largely on blind faith in the BATF to administer a badly written law. The BATF has already indicated that, aside from the 19 guns named in the act, over 160 other guns would be covered under the generic definitions offered in the bill. Given the vagueness of the law, vast numbers of Americans would likely unknowingly, unintentionally violate the law.
A June 1994 Supreme Court decision sheds invaluable light on how the assault-weapons ban will likely be administered. Harold Staples of Oklahoma owned a semiautomatic rifle an AR-15; the BATF raided his home, found the gun, and confiscated it, claiming that it was actually a machine gun, i.e., an automatic weapon. (The National Firearms Act of 1934 bans possession of unregistered, unlicensed machine guns.)
The BATF argued in court that the gun had been illegally modified so that it could fire more than one bullet with each trigger pull the technical definition of an automatic weapon. Staples swore that when he operated the gun, it fired only one shot per trigger pull, and functioned poorly at that. Each violation of the National Firearms Act can be punished by up to ten years in prison. (Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer and author of two books on gun control, notes that the BATF, after it confiscates a person’s guns, sometimes tampers with the guns to make them shoot automatically and then drags the person into court on trumped-up charges.)
The Clinton administration asserted that gun owners must be presumed guilty even in cases where they had no intention to break the law. The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, rejected the administration’s arguments; writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas declared: “The government’s position, is precisely that ‘guns in general’ are dangerous items. [For] the Government . . . the proposition that a defendant’s knowledge that the item he possessed ‘was a gun’ is sufficient for a conviction.” Justice Thomas pilloried the Clinton administration’s position: “In the Government’s view, any person . . . who simply has inherited a gun from a relative and left it untouched in an attic or basement, can be subject to imprisonment, despite absolute ignorance of the gun’s firing capabilities, if the gun turns out to be an automatic.”
The Clinton administration implicitly argued before the Supreme Court that gun owners are the legal equivalent of drug dealers. To justify their claim that gun owners must be presumed guilty, government prosecutors cited cases involving the presumption of guilt under the federal Narcotics Act of 1914. (At one point in the case, federal prosecutors argued that “one would hardly be surprised to learn that owning a gun is not an innocent act.”) Since drug dealers are automatically assumed to know they are violating federal narcotics laws, the Clinton administration claimed that gun owners must be presumed to know when they violate federal gun laws. Yet the Constitution does not expressly guarantee citizens’ right to sell crack, but it does expressly protect citizens’ right to bear arms.
On the surface, the Staples decision was a major victory for gun owners. But federal bureaucrats and congressmen have rarely let court decisions long impede their efforts to further restrict Americans’ liberties. The Staples decision raised hackles among supporters of the assault-weapons ban; Congressman Schumer told The New York Times that the bill may need to be amended to include a proof of intent to violate the law.
Yet, the final bill included no such requirement for proof of criminal intent. Thus, millions of Americans could face five-year prison sentences for such “crimes” as merely buying or possessing a rifle or pistol magazine that would hold more than ten bullets. (The act, in a leap of liberal creativity, defines gun magazines as assault weapons, even though a magazine by itself is harmless.)
The Clinton administration explicitly came out in favor of a ban on all semiautomatics last year. The Clinton administration’s official federal budget presentation for 1995 (released in early 1994) announced: “The administration also supports a ban on semi-automatic firearms.” Clinton administration officials later disavowed the statement, claiming that they didn’t know how that sentence managed to get into the official budget plans of the president as if the sentence was simply a typo caused by a malfunctioning spell-check program.
Assault-weapons laws resemble hate-speech laws. Hate-speech laws usually begin by targeting a few words which almost no one approves. Once the system for controlling and punishing “hate speech” is put into place, there is little or nothing to stop it from expanding to punish more and more types of everyday speech. Similarly, once an assault-weapons law is on the books, there is little to prevent politicians from vastly increasing the number of weapons banned under the law.
Gun laws are an attempt to nationalize to confiscate the right of self-defense. Politicians perennially react to the police’s total failure to control crime by trying to disarm law-abiding citizens. In a nutshell, gun control means that because criminals abuse guns, law-abiding citizens have no right to defend themselves. The worse government fails to control crime, the less right each individual citizen has to defend himself. The guiding principle of handgun banners appears to be: No matter how badly the government fails to protect a citizen, the citizen still has no right to protect himself.
The political creeping repeal of the right to self-defense is a huge decrease in the modern American’s liberty because the government has completely failed to fill the void. The government has stripped millions of people of their right to own weapons yet generally left them free to be robbed, raped, and murdered. Gun control is one of the best cases of governments enacting laws that “corner” private citizens forcing the citizen either to put himself into danger or to be a lawbreaker.
The 1992 Los Angeles riot illustrated why people cannot rely on police to protect their lives or their livelihoods. When mobs began looting, burning, and savagely assaulting defenseless individuals, the Los Angeles police turned tail and ran, leaving hundreds of business owners to see their life savings plundered.
When asked on the first day of the riot about the lack of police protection for people being beaten by mobs, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates replied: “There are going to be situations where people are going to go without assistance. That’s just the facts of life. There are not enough of us to be everywhere.” Gates later admitted that “a little panic and paralysis settled in” among police officers. Armand Arabian, a California Supreme Court justice, noted that if the Los Angeles Police Department had responded any slower to the riots, “we would have seen photos of policemen pasted on milk containers and listed as missing.” While the police effectively ran away from the violent rioters, they did return later to seize the guns and handcuff some of the owners of Korean stores who fought to defend their property. The city government even banned law-abiding citizens from buying bullets or picking up previously purchased weapons after the riot began.
Economist Morgan Reynolds noted:
“The looters and arsonists tended to leave houses and apartment buildings in the riot areas of Los Angeles alone not out of compassion, but because, as a 13-year old neighborhood resident said, ‘The residents got guns and everybody knows that. Nobody’s going to mess with folks in houses.'”
The main effect of banning assault weapons is to give government an excuse to arrest or imprison millions of Americans while doing little or nothing to reduce crime. Regardless of what Congress intends in its assault-weapons ban, federal bureaucrats will stretch, twist, and contort the law to maximize their power over American citizens. For this reason alone, Congress should repeal the ban.
http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/assaultweapons-scam-part-2/ --
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