All God's Children Got Guns

I gotta gun. You gotta gun. All God's children got guns. Gonna march all over the battlefield 'cause all God's children got guns.

---from the musical finale of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1932)

What a useful tool for the anti-Bush Left: the 10-year ban on assault weapons is now expired ---and those who hate guns and gun-owners have a new ball of yarn to play with.

Take, for instance, E.J. Dionne's piece in yesterday's Washington Post. Dionne says

Until it's clear that politicians will pay a price at the voting booths for opposing reasonable gun laws, the NRA will continue to win -- even if the price is putting those Uzis and AK-47s back on the streets.

That's why it was heartening to see Kerry challenge Bush on the president's failure to push for a renewal of the assault weapons ban. Here is a chance to move the gun debate away from the vague terrain of "pro-gun" vs. "anti-gun" to a concrete discussion of a measure that 57 percent of those with a gun in their household and 32 percent of NRA members support. (The figures are from the National Annenberg Election Survey.)

Blah, blah, blah. Do these sophistos really think that those who wish to use semi-automatic "assault rifles" to commit crimes have been ---in any way--- deterred by this ban? That's just an amazing joke. The ban was always about politics and window-dressing. Or does the anti-gun crowd think that an AK-47 with a flash-suppressor and a 30-round clip is less lethal than one without them (which were and still are legal)?

How hard these complaints fall in the light of a few facts.

Here's what Mark Holmberg of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has to say about it:

By the way, we use the term "assault-style," because they look and act like real assault rifles. But they're not fully automatic they fire one round per trigger squeeze, as opposed to a spray of lead from a real assault rifle. Fully automatic weapons have long been tightly controlled and monitored by the feds.

These post-ban rifles fire the same ammo and hold the same 30-round or more clips as the pre-ban guns. Most importantly, they'll blow the same-sized hole in you, which is considerable.

The only thing the ban really accomplished was to drive the prices up on the pre-ban rifles with all those bells and whistles, and original-equipment high-capacity pistols like mine.

Which is why there are plenty of gun-collecting NRA types who are secretly hoping the ban is renewed. Otherwise, their collections will drop significantly in value.

People who are intent on killing other people were never deterred by this ban. That would include terrorists, whom John Kerry now fatuously claims will have an "easier" time of it because of the President's "lack of leadership" on this now-expired ban:

"Today George Bush chose to make the job of terrorists easier and make the job of police officers harder, and that's just plain wrong."

Yeah. We're back to that stuff again. No honest person believes that John Kerry has a stronger commitment to fighting terrorists than does the President. Nor does any honest person believe that a terrorist gives a rat's ass about this country's gun-control laws.