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).]