Let’s say you’re an alcoholic.
In a typical week you go through a case of beer, a dozen bottles of wine, a couple bottles of vodka and a pint of bourbon. And on Sunday evenings after dinner you like to chill with a snifter or two of brandy.
On one of those evenings you take stock of what your addiction has wrought. You’ve lost your job, your house and your savings. Your wife has left you and your kids are in therapy. You decide to make a change. You resolve that next Sunday you’ll limit yourself to just one brandy.
Are we supposed to applaud you for incremental change or point out the obvious: that this will make no difference at all?
That’s exactly what’s going on with the early tepid willingness of some Republicans and, for now, the NRA to support a ban on bump stocks, the cheap devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to operate in a fully automatic mode.
I have serious doubts that even this common sense proposal will become law. It goes against the gun movement’s tried and true strategy of opposing even the most obvious restrictions while pushing for ever more liberal gun laws. After the Newtown massacre, the NRA initially signed on to work with Vice President Joe Biden on some mild reforms, but then groups even more extreme than the NRA outflanked them and they caved. In the end, nothing passed except even more lenient gun laws.
Moreover, keep in mind that the same Congress that would need to pass the bump stock restriction had teed up for passage of a bill to allow silencers. That bill was withdrawn last week only after a madman in Las Vegas blew away 59 people and injured more than 500 with a very noisy gun. It was pointed out that a silencer would not have improved the situation, but don’t expect that the silencer bill has been silenced. Give it some time and it’ll be back.
The reason that the bump stock legislation even has a chance of passage is that in his cache of weapons, the Las Vegas shooter had several semi-automatic weapons that had been modified with these things. Sure the bump stocks are bad, but the semi-automatics are even worse. In fact, Marines are taught to use their automatic weapons in semi-automatic mode because they fire more accurately.
So, if you really wanted to make Americans safer you would ban semi-automatic weapons and forget about the bump stocks, which of course would be useless if they had nothing to modify.
Those of us among the majority of Americans who want stronger gun safety laws shouldn’t be satisfied with a bump stock ban, even in the unlikely event that it actually passes a Republican Congress and is signed by our unstable president. We should push for a complete ban on the sale and possession of semi-automatics for civilians. These weapons, along with armor piercing bullets and handguns, have no place in our society. They are designed to kill people plain and simple and they have no legitimate purpose.
And if the Second Amendment is found to stand in the way of sanity, well then let’s, as I’ve recently argued, repeal the Second Amendment. The founders of our nation gave us a fine Constitution with two major flaws. The first was its failure to end, or even mention, slavery and the second was the Second Amendment. You can’t give them a pass on slavery, which they understood was wrong, but the Second Amendment was an odd afterthought with even odder language. The founders would likely be appalled at how their amendment has been perverted to allow killing machines that they never could have anticipated. The extremist view of the Second Amendment is very anti-American, very unpatriotic.
Still, whether understood at the time of the Constitution’s adoption or not, both of these flaws have caused uncounted death, injury, suffering and horror.
It took a bloody Civil War to end slavery and for another century and a half we’ve continued to struggle with its aftermath. Let’s hope it doesn’t take the same to fix our Constitution’s other awful flaw.
But we can’t even start to make things better until the idea of repeal becomes normalized just as the insanity of legal semi-automatic weapons has become normalized. We won’t turn the tide until some of us begin saying out loud what the abolitionists were saying in the early 19th century: These weapons of mass destruction — whether the institution of slavery or the existence of people-killing machines — must be stopped.
A bump stock ban would be okay, but folks, it ain’t nearly enough.
