@Leafsnail: That's a fair criticism when it's spelled out, but I think it's mistaking rhetorical flourish for something more than the forum blustering it is.
That said, I'll dive in a little deeper and try to expand on that third paragraph in a way that doesn't leave steps out, because this topic is one that's very dear to me. I can dig up citations for the facts below on request, but you can probably find them by poking around on guncite.org, too.
AWBs and MG bans are categorically mala prohibita—I think we can both take that as a given? Basically every strict liability possession law is; it's what one does with the item in question or intends to do, and for me to overcome my ideological opposition to the idea of mala prohibitum, it takes some serious proof of the efficacy of a law. So, I think the only reasonable way to evaluate an AWB or an MG ban is by its efficacy in stopping crime.
I'll hit machine gun bans first, because that's a really easy one, although it takes some background. The start of machine gun regulation in the US was with the National Firearms Act of 1934 (which morphed into the Gun Control Act of 1968, I believe, but NFA is what everyone calls it anyway). That didn't ban machine guns, but it did impose registration requirements and a tax on machine guns changing possession. In 1986, a ban on civilian registrations of newly-manufactured machine guns was put into place, but all the old ones are grandfathered in (with $4000, I could buy a STEN submachine gun or a Mac-10 even today). There are three reasons why I think the 1986 change has been ineffective:
- Since 1934, two murders have been committed with registered machine guns. Both were committed after the ban, and one was committed by a police officer with a government weapon.
- In early-1980s Miami, the city then regarded as the murder capital of the world, fewer than one percent of homicides involved machine guns. In the years leading up to the machine gun registration ban in 1986, machine guns seized by police departments in big cities were almost uniformly statistical noise.
- So machine guns weren't ever involved in as many murders as popular culture would have us believe, but at the same time, access to automatic weapons is relatively easy for basically any flavor of organized crime. The default state of a firearm that loads the next cartridge automatically is to fire automatically too, and the machining required to make a gun that shoots really fast is easy. That's also discounting arms smuggling into the US, which is a plausible scenario given how easily other illicit substances make it into the country.
So machine gun bans fail both of my tests for acceptable mala prohibita laws: not only do they target an insignificant slice of a larger problem, but they're also targeted at the law-abiding portion of the population.
It's a similar story for assault weapons bans: by far the most common scenario for murders is one person with a criminal history killing another person with a criminal history with a cheap handgun. Weapons that would have counted as assault weapons under the provision of the '94 ban account for, at the very, very most, about five percent of murders. I would hazard a guess that it's even fewer, because most statistics available say handguns vs. long guns, which throws in shotguns and other rifles that don't fall under the assault weapon label. The '94 AWB targeted legal owners, targeted a minuscule problem, and on top of that isn't even very effective: New York State still has a copy of the '94 AWB in effect, and despite that, one of my friends up there owns a fully-legal M4-pattern carbine, complete with 30-round magazines dated before the ban. If an assault weapons ban is targeted at mass shootings (which is statistically unwise; mass shootings are a tiny fraction of the gun deaths in any given year), the only way to even possibly impact mass killings (and I suspect there's a replacement effect with things like arsons and bombings; mass killings result from abnormal psychology) would be a blanket ban on semi-automatic guns of all flavors (pistols are just as common as 'assault weapons').
As for why I think
that's a bad idea, let me bring in some more statistics (condensed from
this post, where you can find citations). In the early 1990s, several studies were performed on the number of defensive gun uses per year (which overwhelmingly involve concealed semi-automatic pistols). The smallest number by a reputable source was 1.46m per year, and that was Clinton's DoJ. Other numbers (Kleck and Gertz) were up to 2.5m. The Bureau of Justice Statistics gives 326,090 as the number of criminal gun uses in 2009.
The number of criminal gun uses is difficult to quantify, though, so I'll do homicides instead. Kleck and Gertz found that 15.7% of people involved in defensive gun uses believe they 'almost certainly' saved a life, and 14.6% believed they 'probably' did. We'll assume they're almost all full of crap: 90% of the 'almost certainly' people didn't save a life, and 99% of the 'probably' people also didn't save a life. Those deeply conservative metrics leave us with ~1.7% of defensive gun uses saving lives. Applied to the 1.46m number—not even the one Kleck and Gertz themselves came up with, but one about 40% smaller—that yields 25,000 life-saving gun uses per year. From 1999 and 2010, gun-related homicides claimed an average of 11,740 people per year: so using the most conservative numbers produced by impartial sources, guns save two lives for each one they take.
And even that doesn't tell the whole story. The overwhelming majority of murderers are already criminals:
Looking only to official criminal records, data over the past thirty years consistently show that the mythology of murderers as ordinary citizens does not hold true. Studies have found that approximately 75% of murderers have adult criminal records, and that murderers average a prior adult criminal career of six years, including four major adult felony arrests. These studies also found that when the murder occurred "[a]bout 11% of murder arrestees [were] actually on pre-trial release"--that is, they were awaiting trial for another offense.
The fact that only 75% of murderers have adult crime records should not be misunderstood as implying that the remaining 25% of murderers are non-criminals. The reason over half of those 25% of murderers don't have adult records is that they are juveniles. Thus, by definition they cannot have an adult criminal record.
A study from 1948-1952 (which is horrendously out of date, but the only one I could find, see
here in the third section of bolded text) suggested that more than half of the victims of homicide had previous criminal records too, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics said in 1997 that 80% of imprisoned criminals who were in for firearms-related offenses obtained their firearm from friends, family, or illegal sellers.
There you have it: I'm generally categorically against gun control any stricter than what we have today, not only because it yields ineffectual farces like 922(r), but also because we have very effective systems for preventing legal gun sales to criminals in place already, because legally-owned guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are incredibly effective crime-prevention tools, and because there's a mountain of statistics on my side.
@greatorder: I post on the Quarter To Three forums too. I can handle the Bay12 hivemind, I think.
@Tellemurius: Right, that's the idea. With five US-made parts out of 15, the rifle counts as US-made, so as long as I keep that magic number, I can do whatever I like with it (so long as it isn't otherwise illegal). It's a nonsensical hassle, though.
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