- 11,908
- Marin County
It occurred to me the other day that I doubt you could pass legislation to ban machine guns with the current conservative landscape. The reading of 2A is so absolute that I'm not sure you could get 60 senators to support restricting field artillery or rocket propelled grenades, if they weren't already restricted. I don't believe there is any rational self-defense argument for high capacity magazines (I've owned several firearms with high-cap mags), just as there isn't (at one time at least) a rational or at least sufficient self-defense argument for machine guns or grenades or battle tanks. There is a militia argument to be made for genuine military equipment, but it doesn't seem like there is an appetite to parse 2A into discrete [self defense | militia] rulesets. But there ought to be. There should be two categories of firearms, those eligible for private ownership, and those that must be maintained by organized militias. Organized militias often bark and grandstand and threaten, but they don't go shooting up elementary schools - and I do see a rational reason for having them (I mean, look at Ukraine, Iran, DPRK etc where an armed citizenry would be a benefit).
People will argue that a hunting rifle with a 5-round box magazine is still a lethal instrument and that banning military-esque rifles doesn't solve anything. That's true to an extent, but an AR-pattern rifle is designed for and quite good at killing a lot of people rather quickly. A semi-auto hunting rifle would not be as effective - maybe in this case the school resource officer would have been able to subdue the ******** before he killed 19 kids if the perp had to deal with a clunky reload process. Beyond that, and I've hammered on this point before, I don't think kids like this would even commit these acts if they can't do it with their preferred Call of Duty/Counterstrike Weapon. This ******** and Texas (and the other ****heads who have done similar things) is not walking into a school with a lame ass wood furniture .303 hunting rifle because that isn't part of the fantasy. The AR15 is instrumental to the act, it's not merely a tool. They want to be tacticool. The tacticool fetishism is all part of it. I bet this ******** had accessory rails for flashlights and **** on his rifle like he's some sort of Navy Seal. Can somebody name a mass casualty school shooting incident in the last 20 years where the weapon used was not at least supposed to look like a military weapon? Kel-Tecs are lame as ****, but they are cheap and look like something special forces might use in a b-budget action movie.
So what do we do? I'd propose that only licensed (yes, federally licensed) militia members should be able to buy any rifle that can accept high capacity magazines, and that those militias must self regulate their members. I think there is clear precedent that this works. When's the last time somebody with a Machine Gun permit or even an SBR permit committed an act like this with the weapon they were licensed to own? I can't recall a single time.
Imagine if this rule existed the day this kid turned 18 - lets imagine the possible outcomes. Would he have joined a local militia just to be able to buy an AR15 to commit this act? It's possible, but if the Militia had any sort of standards for its members, it would have very likely had some reservations about allowing this kid to access or buy the weapon he wanted to use. There's your screening right there. Alternatively, he doesn't join the militia and therefore is not able to acquire an AR15, the gun he really wanted to have for this fantasy. Does he go to the local gun store and pick up some limited capacity wood-stock hunting rifle? I really, really doubt it. Worse case scenario is he does do that, and his rampage is limited by the relatively less effective gun. More than likely, I think the scenario plays out with the kid listening to some thrash metal, feeling super angsty, playing some CoD, and doing nothing.
We have to stop giving these kids (who we can't realistically know about beforehand) the opportunity and means to perpetrate these deadly larps.
People will argue that a hunting rifle with a 5-round box magazine is still a lethal instrument and that banning military-esque rifles doesn't solve anything. That's true to an extent, but an AR-pattern rifle is designed for and quite good at killing a lot of people rather quickly. A semi-auto hunting rifle would not be as effective - maybe in this case the school resource officer would have been able to subdue the ******** before he killed 19 kids if the perp had to deal with a clunky reload process. Beyond that, and I've hammered on this point before, I don't think kids like this would even commit these acts if they can't do it with their preferred Call of Duty/Counterstrike Weapon. This ******** and Texas (and the other ****heads who have done similar things) is not walking into a school with a lame ass wood furniture .303 hunting rifle because that isn't part of the fantasy. The AR15 is instrumental to the act, it's not merely a tool. They want to be tacticool. The tacticool fetishism is all part of it. I bet this ******** had accessory rails for flashlights and **** on his rifle like he's some sort of Navy Seal. Can somebody name a mass casualty school shooting incident in the last 20 years where the weapon used was not at least supposed to look like a military weapon? Kel-Tecs are lame as ****, but they are cheap and look like something special forces might use in a b-budget action movie.
So what do we do? I'd propose that only licensed (yes, federally licensed) militia members should be able to buy any rifle that can accept high capacity magazines, and that those militias must self regulate their members. I think there is clear precedent that this works. When's the last time somebody with a Machine Gun permit or even an SBR permit committed an act like this with the weapon they were licensed to own? I can't recall a single time.
Imagine if this rule existed the day this kid turned 18 - lets imagine the possible outcomes. Would he have joined a local militia just to be able to buy an AR15 to commit this act? It's possible, but if the Militia had any sort of standards for its members, it would have very likely had some reservations about allowing this kid to access or buy the weapon he wanted to use. There's your screening right there. Alternatively, he doesn't join the militia and therefore is not able to acquire an AR15, the gun he really wanted to have for this fantasy. Does he go to the local gun store and pick up some limited capacity wood-stock hunting rifle? I really, really doubt it. Worse case scenario is he does do that, and his rampage is limited by the relatively less effective gun. More than likely, I think the scenario plays out with the kid listening to some thrash metal, feeling super angsty, playing some CoD, and doing nothing.
We have to stop giving these kids (who we can't realistically know about beforehand) the opportunity and means to perpetrate these deadly larps.
