From time to time, old articles show up in my feed as I’m looking for the news of the day. Most of the time, they’re a distraction. A shooting in Europe that’s two years old can make me double-take for a moment, thinking this is something worth talking about, only to find out that yeah, it is, and I had.
But with semi-automatic bans being the new hotness among the anti-gun crowd, a piece from 2016 was actually relevant for a change.
It’s by none other than John Lott. Then, writing for the National Review, he offered the following, which is just as relevant today as it was nine years ago:
Gun-control advocates have continually demonstrated their ignorance about how guns operate. How often do we hear them ask, “why do people need a semi-automatic Bushmaster to go out and kill deer?” But the answer is simple: A Bushmaster is a hunting rifle — it has just been made to look like a military weapon.
If, however, the Democrats plan to ban semi-automatic handguns, banning revolvers isn’t going to be far behind. Not that banning revolvers would reduce gun crime, either.
#share#Revolvers get their name from a revolving cylinder that contains bullets in separate chambers. Gun-control advocates will eventually realize that revolvers actually fire bullets at a faster rate than do semi-automatic pistols — semi-automatics have to do a lot more work to load the next bullet in the chamber. Semi-automatics can hold more bullets and it used to be true that they could be reloaded more quickly than revolvers. But while semi-automatics are still easier to reload, technology has advanced to the point where revolvers can be reloaded just as quickly.
In contrast to semi-automatics that can hold a magazine of any size, revolvers are limited to eight to ten bullets (depending on the caliber of the bullets being used). But with training, a mass shooter can fire just as many bullets with a sufficient rapidity that their ability to commit these crimes would be unaffected by the time needed to reload.
Moreover, revolvers have a major advantage over semi-automatics: They don’t jam as frequently. The spring in a magazine can lose strength and therefore its ability to properly push bullets cleanly into the chamber. Large-capacity magazines actually make jamming much more likely, as you need a very strong spring to push the last few bullets into the chamber. Jammed guns actually saved lives in both the Aurora, Colo, movie-theater shooting and the Gabby Giffords shooting in Tucson, Ariz.
Either way, today’s ignorant politicians want to ban all semi-automatic guns. Tomorrow they will push to ban revolvers.
He’s not wrong, either.
Lott goes on to note that mass killers will simply bring multiple guns to the site of their atrocities and switch firearms as needed. A ban on semi-autos won’t actually change much of anything for would-be mass murderers.
But it’ll impact regular folks a great deal, which is really all that matters to most anti-gun voices.
Criminals get guns regularly. They get them in even nations with super strict gun laws and limited points of entry. They’ll keep getting semi-autos aplenty. Everyone knows it.
Yet anti-gunners have actually said they don’t like loosening gun control laws because it might lead to more guns being sold. They know criminals can’t buy guns lawfully, but they’re not worried about them. They’re worried about you and me. They don’t want us owning guns at all, and they have to do it one at a time.
For now, a semi-auto ban is the goal as opposed to a replication of the 1996 Assault Weapon Ban.
If they get their way, revolvers are next. Lever-actions are next. Pump actions are next. Literally every kind of repeating firearm is at risk because someone somewhere is guaranteed to do something evil with it.
Since 2016, nothing has changed on that front. Nothing at all.
Nor will it change until these people accept that we’re not giving up and decide to do something else with their lives, and there’s not much chance of that happening.
Read the full article here
