Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
From: [ACUS 10] at [WACCVM.SPS.MOT.COM] (Mark Fuller)
Subject: WSJ: The Assault on Assault Weapons
Date: Fri, 7 Jan 1994 19:27:50 GMT

[from The Wall Street Journal
 Jan. 6, 1994, page A12]

                     The Assault on Assault Weapons

                            By JAMES BOVARD

        President Clinton is backing legislation that could lead to the
confiscation of tens of millions of private rifles, shotguns and
pistols. Though the bill Mr. Clinton supports purportedly targets only
"assault weapons," the loose definitions and expansive goals of the
antigun lobby will almost certainly lead to a vast increase in the
number of weapons to be banned.

        In November, the Senate passed an amendment to its crime bill
that would ban ownership of assault weapons, and a House-Senate
conference in the coming weeks will decide the provision's fate. Mr.
Clinton, Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh have
all come out in favor of banning assault weapons. Others are jumping on
the bandwagon: Gov. William Weld has endorsed a ban in Massachusetts,
and Gov. Mario Cuomo is calling a special session of the New York state
Legislature on Martin Luther King Day for the purpose of considering
banning assault weapons. In recent years, three states and dozens of
cities and counties have banned or severely restricted the ownership of
assault weapons.

Gun Confusion:

        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 bans focus on
semi-automatic rifles, and media coverage routinely confuses
semiautomatic with automatic machine guns, ownership of which has been
severely restricted by the federal government since 1934.

        As a result of muddled definitions of assault weapons, bans on
such guns have been extremely arbitrary. In 1989, California 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 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 vast majority of Californians did not register their guns.
Thus the law may have created as many as 300,000 new criminals.
According to Michael McNulty, chairman of the private California
Organization for Public Safety, "We estimate that hundreds of citizens
have been arrested and prosecuted for firearms not on the regulated
list." In numerous cases, police carrying out searches of people's homes
have seized weapons they allege to be illegal assault weapons--and then
have refused to return them even after receiving proof that the guns are
not legally banned under California law.

        The assault weapon 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."

        Similar travesties have happened elsewhere. 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 sought to prevent
citizens from having an unfair advantage over burglars or rapists who
break into their homes. In February of last year a local court struck
down the law as unconstitutionally vague and a violation of the state
constitution.

        In 1990, New Jersey banned ownership of so-called assault
rifles. Gov. 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." Mr. Clinton praised the New Jersey
law as a model for the nation. But the ban was so extensive that even
some models of BB guns were outlawed. Joseph Constance, deputy chief of
the Trenton, N.J., police department, told the Senate Judiciary
Committee in August of last year: "Since police started keeping
statistics, we now know that assault weapons are/were used in an
underwhelming .026 of 1% 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 has an estimated 300,000 owners of "assault
weapons," each potentially facing up to five years in prison for
violating the state law if they do not turn in their guns.

        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.

        In 1991, 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 sent out threatening letters,
and policemen have gone knocking on doors demanding that people
surrender their guns, according to Stephen Halbrook, a lawyer and author
of two books on gun control.

        Mr. 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."

        Many local and state assault weapons laws, as well as the bill
that the Senate passed in November, contain provisions apparently
written by people spooked after watching too many Arnold Schwarzenegger
movies. The Senate bill bans guns that have grenade-launcher and
bayonet-mount attachments. But neither the 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 U.S. (Grenade launchers were used by
the FBI in their final assault in Waco, but the FBI would not be
affected by the bill.)

        The assault-weapon amendment, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein
(D., Calif.), is widely perceived as a "foot in the door" to far more
extensive gun bans. When a Christian Science Monitor reporter asked Ms.
Feinstein why her amendment did not ban all semiautomatic guns, she
replied: "We couldn't have gotten it through Congress." Rep. Charles
Schumer (D., N.Y.) 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 could confiscate 35 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 now going on in New York.

Expanding Definitions:

        Assault weapons laws resemble hate speech laws. Hate speech laws
usually begin by targeting a few words that 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.

        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. America has a limited number of police, and
politicians must decide who the real public enemies are. If Mr. Clinton
signs an assault weapons ban, it could signal the start of an attack on
gun owners' constitutional rights that could far surpass all previous
gun bans.

[Mr. Bovard is the author of the forthcoming "Lost Rights: The
Destruction of Amencan Liberty" (St. Martin's, April 1994).]