Reading National Review Online has become drudgery, with their never-Trumpism and pseudo-progressivism just remarkably wearisome. Most times I almost can’t stand it. But occasionally something comes across my desk that needs to be addressed.
Beltway boob Robert Verbruggen waxes know-nothing on bump stocks.
There is no good reason to make fully automatic weapons or their equivalents generally available to the public. The Second Amendment doesn’t require it: The Supreme Court’s Heller ruling took care to explain why it didn’t apply to weapons that are “dangerous or unusual” or not in “common use,” including “M-16 rifles and the like.” This is strongly supported by previous Supreme Court precedent (the “common use” standard comes from 1939’s U.S. v. Miller). It is also consistent with history: The Heller Court explained that there is a strong tradition of prohibiting the carrying of especially dangerous weapons, and that “the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty.” There may be an argument that the Court got it wrong — that the people are to be allowed any kind of firearm that exists, all the better for resisting tyranny — but few constitutional rights are so broad in scope as to completely override any threat to public safety they pose. And, if nothing else, imposing such a broad interpretation is a good way to get the Second Amendment repealed.
Self-defense is not a compelling reason for bump stocks to be easily available, either. Outside of a war zone, one would not fire a fully automatic weapon at an intruder indoors or carry one in the streets late at night. Full autos are also not hunting weapons, or tools suited to pinpoint-accurate target shooting. About all that can be said for them is that they’re fun to shoot, at least for those who can afford the copious amounts of ammunition they burn at dramatically reduced accuracy. That would be enough if the case against them were weak, but it’s not. Weapons equipped with these devices let off far more rounds, far more quickly, than do the semiautomatic weapons commonly used for hunting and self-defense. Unleashed on a crowd, even from hundreds of yards away, they can produce unprecedented casualties.
The second amendment was written by men who risked their livelihoods, their wealth, their fortunes, their lives, and the lives of their families to overthrow the government under which they lived. They used cannon when they had them, and would have been quite happy to have used semi- or fully-automatic weapons. To argue differently is idiotic, with the founders who wrote the very amendment under debate having seen the bloodshed, lose of life, loss of limb, and pain they had witnessed during the war of independence.
Public safety wasn’t the apex of their concerns, and in addition to being a war against England, the war of independence was a civil war. In fact, it was primarily a civil war, and would have been over in a month had all of the colonists been patriots. As far as the “unprecedented casualties, if the shooter could have gotten fertilizer byproducts into the hotel – and one may conclude that he could have given the large cache of weapons and ammunition we carried to his rooms – he could have caused significant casualties, and even more than his shooting if he had been able to get explosives and shrapnel under the stage or in or near the concert that night. Moreover, I have argued and will continue to argue that if he had used semi-automatic fire and aimed with good optics, the casualty count could have been much higher. So others argue as well who know more than I do.
What if the Fedgov going to do, outlaw fertilizer? Bump fire stocks can be mimicked with rubber bands, a fact that beltway boob apparently doesn’t know since he likely doesn’t even know anyone who owns a gun, much less make it to the flyover states to learn about the people anywhere besides the beltway. Are we going to outlaw rubber bands too? Dismissing rubber bands, since that is a silly alternative to either slide fire stocks or fully automatic, is he going to outlaw people like Jerry Miculek who can fire (accurately, mind you) virtually as fast as fully automatic with his finger? Many professional 3-gun competitors can do that.
My own son Daniel has said to me many times that he never needed automatic capabilities in the Marines (he was a SAW gunner, but carried an M4 on occasion). The Marines had shot so many rounds down range, and in close quarters battle training, that they could put three rounds into an enemy as fast as the three-round burst on the M4. Beltway boob is just looking for someone or something to blame, and it doesn’t bother me one bit that the progressives are after my rights. My rights come from God, not the second amendment, and I’ll defend them as such.
Now on to a more daffy commentary today at NR by Michael Brendan Dougherty.
Alert readers (and listeners) will know that on a philosophical level, I’m a squish on the gun stuff. I find it embarrassing that the United States is “exceptional” in the amount of violence its people inflict on one another, and themselves, with handguns. And I’m skeptical about the utility of an unqualified right to acquire weapons of such lethality. My colleague Kevin Williamson says that the right to bear arms makes us citizens and not subjects. And I agree, up to a point …
[ … ]
Sometimes people put Schermer’s argument more baldly. They ask something like this: “Do you really think Bubba in camo gear hiding in the forest is going to take on the U.S. military? The U.S. military has nuclear weapons!”
Who exactly do you think has stymied the U.S. in Afghanistan for 16 years? The Taliban is made up of Afghan Bubbas. The Taliban doesn’t need to defeat nuclear weapons, though they are humiliating a nuclear power for the second time in history. They use a mix of Kalashnikovs and WWII-era bolt-action rifles. Determined insurgencies are really difficult to fight, even if they are only armed with Enfield rifles and you can target them with a TOW missiles system that can spot a cat in the dark from two miles away. In Iraq, expensive tanks were destroyed with simple improvised explosives.
He goes on to discuss the moral costs of such warfare against its own citizens. But this all misses the point, and while the U.S. military goes about its business preparing for fifth generation warfare, they do so because they haven’t learned how to win fourth generation warfare and are planning their next engagement being a near-peer.
Do you suppose this would look like great land armies getting into formation at the edges of great fields of battle and marching towards each other? What do you think such a messy civil war in America would look like? Bubba would be wearing a Ghillie suit, shooting a bolt action rifle, or a modern sporting rifle, and after the shot you will never hear from him again – until the next one. And you’ll never catch him. Police will have to decide what side to take, and if they take the wrong one, they will be dealt with in the middle of the night when they take their dogs out to pee in the backyard.
Insurgent will be mixed with progressive statist, and there will be no SEAL teams or nuclear weapons to which you can turn because you won’t know one from another. There will be nowhere to target a nuclear weapon, and nowhere for a SEAL team to raid. All of their close quarters battle preparations will be for naught when their own families are in peril due to civil warfare. These aren’t Afghan tribesmen you’re dealing with. These are engineers, mechanics, fabricators and welders, chemists, and the world’s best machinists. If you think Afghanistan was rough, wait to see what civil war would look like in America.
If you have ever said something like, “You can’t win because the government has a land army and nuclear weapons,” here is the moral of the story for you. You are an idiot. You haven’t thought through this well enough, and you need to see the second amendment for what it really is. It is the best guarantor of peace because tyranny is mutually assured destruction. The statists know that, or else America will suffer the consequences.
However, given the insular life of the metro-riders inside the beltway, I wouldn’t expect anything else out of National Review. Behind, out of touch, and out of commission.
