Gun Bill Only Works if History is Ignored

The NRA Annual Meeting this year was my first time attending anything that size in the Second Amendment space. I’ve been to DragonCon–also, conveniently, in Atlanta–but this was different. This time, I had the chance to meet a lot of people whose work I knew professionally, but had never had a chance to meet in person.

One of those was Charles C.W. Cooke, who writes for the National Review and various NRA publications. The British-born American still has that accent, which I now hear in everything he writes, and he seemed like a hell of a nice guy for the few moments I got to speak with him.

Whether it’s despite coming from the UK or because of it, he’s a staunch defender of the right to keep and bear arms.

So, when I saw he had a piece at America’s 1st Freedom, I was interested to read it.

Yeah, Cooke ain’t playing around.

Titled, “Anti-Gunners Want to Change the Past to Take Away Today’s Freedom,” it honestly could have meant a whole heap of things, up to and including how the NFA was long defended as a tax versus gun control, only to be gun control now when it’s convenient.

Instead, it’s something else, and something equally as BS.

Here we go again! Just months after an election in which advocates of the right to keep and bear arms swept to victory at all levels of government, a bunch of gun-control advocates in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives have convened to pen one of the most radical federal gun-control proposals in recent memory.

…

The bill’s co-author, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), says that his law would prohibit “inherently dangerous and unusually lethal mechanisms.” By this, he means that it would ban the most commonly owned rifle in the United States, that it would outlaw all rifles that can accept magazines, that it would interdict all standard-issue magazines (and, possibly, given how it is written, it would ban all magazines) and that it would grant the federal government unlimited authority to compile an exhaustive, perpetually updated, “pre-cleared” list of firearms that it considers acceptable for civilian sale.

Indeed, as Heinrich openly concedes, the core purpose of the “GOSAFE Act” is to empower Washington, D.C., to micromanage which types of firearms may be sold—and to do so on the assumption that the government knows better than the people what the people need for their self-defense. Were his bill to pass into law, it would effectively invert the Second Amendment, transmuting it from an unassailable right of the people into a privilege doled out by the state.

In D.C. v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment presumptively protects any firearm that is “in common use.” The GOSAFE Act proceeds as if this simply never happened.

Now, we’ve talked about the GOSAFE Act before, and that it’s a particularly egregious infringement on the right to keep and bear arms, and Cooke is absolutely correct that it requires one to ignore Heller completely.

While I’m not a fan of the “in common use” argument as to what can be banned and what can’t, in part because new technology is never in common use when it first comes out, which means new developments can be swiftly restricted and still meet this criterion. However, it is what the Supreme Court ruled in Heller, so it’s what lawmakers and the courts are supposed to go by.

The GOSAFE Act ignores this entirely.

In fact, if this measure were to pass, we’d basically be relegated to mostly 19th-century firearms with a handful of exceptions. Kel-Tech’s new pistol would likely survive, as would things like the M1 Garand, maybe, but not the popular Glock handguns, Smith & Wesson’s M&P handguns, any AR-15 or other semi-auto rifle with a detachable magazine.

For most of us, it would be back to before World War I in a lot of cases.

But that’s not what Heller laid out. Regardless of how you feel about semi-automatic handguns and rifles, they’re very common. Most handguns sold these days are semi-auto, magazine-fed handguns that would be banned by this measure.

And everything only seems viable if you ignore Heller.

Cooke mentions one of the “minds” behind this, saying that other guns would be available, so it’s not a violation of the Second Amendment, which is an insane argument. By that logic, if you can call it that, so long as there’s a single model of any gun, including a single-shot .22 of some sort that’s useless for much of anything beyond plinking, anything can be banned.

That’s not “in common use” at all.

So yeah, anti-gunners are trying to ignore history, particularly when it’s inconvenient. They’ll most assuredly use it when they think it works in their favor, though. Funny how it always seems to work that way, ain’t it?