Myths about the AR-15 and bans on weapons

As predictable as the sun rising in the east, the busy-body tyrants in Washington unleashed their meddle-in-your-life energies after the Orlando massacre, attempting to stop future killings with more anti-gun laws.

Were it not for the seriousness of the tragedy, the irony of Congress wanting to ban guns or limit ownership of types of guns is that every law that Congress passes comes with a mandate:

We must obey their laws at the point of a government gun!

If you disobey many of Congress’ laws, it authorizes some gun-toting Federalissimo to put you under arrest with a gun pointed at your head.

It’s OK for them to carry, but not you.

In any event, much of the past week’s legislative hysteria has focused on banning what everyone calls military assault rifles, the popular AR-15. 

But the editors at National Review dispelled a few AR-15 myths that everyone in Congress and all anti-gun Americans would do well to read. Forthwith, a few excerpts …

— Matt Walsh

Of all the gun deaths in the United States in a given year, the large majority — 60% or more — are suicides. Of the ones that are homicides, all rifles and shotguns together account for about 4%, and so-called assault rifles account for such a minuscule number of murders that law enforcement agencies do not even keep statistics on them. 

The idea that American streets are running with blood because of “assault weapons” is entirely unsupported by the evidence… 

The most popular rifle in the United States today is the AR-style rifle, similar though not identical to the Sig Sauer rifle used in the Orlando slaughter. Given how common AR-style rifles are, it is surprising that such weapons are as seldom used in crimes as they are. 

But the AR has a way of attracting myths: Contrary to urban lore, the “AR” in the name denotes “Armalite,” the name of the firm that designed the weapon, not “assault rifle.” It is not, contrary to the pronouncements of any number of Hollywood’s finest thinkers, a “machine gun” or a “fully automatic” rifle; instead, it is a semi-automatic rifle, meaning that it fires one round each time the trigger is pulled, like a revolver or a duck-hunter’s shotgun. There is nothing particularly fast about its rate of fire or remarkable about its accuracy, and, contrary to so many media reports, it is not a “high-powered” rifle, firing, as it does, the .223 Remington or 5.56mm cartridge, which isn’t even powerful enough to be used to hunt deer or similarly sized game legally in most of the United States. …

From 1994 through 2004, a federal ban on “assault weapons” was in place, and it had no detectable effect on crime. The independent Task Force on Community Preventative Services found no evidence that the assault-weapon ban prevented any violence. The National Research Council’s review of the academic literature on the question found that the data “did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence.” The Justice Department’s own study suggested that any effects of the law were too small to be statistically measured. … 

Many Americans do in fact have high-powered rifles in their homes: These are the very hunting rifles that the Left always promises it has no intention of going after, but which are far more powerful than .223-chambered AR-style rifles, and many of which operate in the same semi-automatic fashion. It’s rare that anybody is murdered with one. 

The fact is that the United States does not have an assault-weapons problem, nor does it have a general gun-control problem. It has a series of interconnected problems related to defective criminal justice practices and a failed mental health system, the collapse of the family and the predictable spiritual crisis belonging to an age of nihilism.

And, most relevant to Orlando, it has the problem of being an open, liberal society rather than a garrison state, which means that its public places will always be vulnerable to terrorism of the sort perpetrated by the ISIS groupie responsible for the Orlando atrocity, whether they use guns and bullets or matches and gasoline.