"What Will Gun Controllers Do When Americans Ignore an ?Assault Weapons? Ban?"

. . . Like good little lemmings they will pass more gun laws and then wonder why the shootings in Chicago have not stopped.

Prohibition was kneecapped by Americans' widespread refusal to stop producing, selling, and drinking booze. Millions of Americans smoked marijuana decades before majority sentiment creeped toward legalizing the stuff. Gays and lesbians not only surreptitiously lived and loved

righteously) stomped cops who raided the Stonewall Inn, ultimately precipitating liberalization. And restrictions on exporting encryption

printing it on T-shirts as an act of civil disobedience.

But in the wake of Omar Mateen's bloody rampage in Orlando, gun control advocates think that overcoming the passionate opposition of firearms owners and imposing a ban on a difficult to define class of "assault weapons" is a swell idea whose time has come. This prohibition will somehow be different.

"Those who defend the easy accessibility of assault weapons should meet these families and explain why that makes sense," President Obama tut-tutted last week. But the moralizer-in-chief failed to make sense himself, calling for the outlawing of a category of devices that doesn't really exist.

"The term assault weapon itself, of disputed origin, is a thorn in the side of gun enthusiasts, who point out that the differences between 'assault weapons' and other semi-automatics are largely cosmetic and don't increase the gun's lethality," explains Slate senior editor Rachael Larimore, in a piece taking the media to task for reporting and editorializing on guns without getting the facts straight.

"Because these guns are really just ordinary rifles, it is hard for legislators to effectively regulate them without banning half the handguns in the country (those that are semiautomatic and/or have detachable magazines) and many hunting rifles as well," adds UCLA law professor and gun control advocate Adam Winkler, who has actually done his research.

Winkler also emphasizes why gun owners are so hardened in their opposition to further legal restrictions: "Gun control advocates ridicule the NRA's claim that the government is coming to take away people's guns, then try to outlaw perhaps the most popular rifle in the country."

Gun owners' response is best summarized by one of their more popular slogans of recent years: "Molon labe." Usually translated as "come and take them," that was Spartan King Leonidas I's legendary response to the Persian demand that he and his men surrender their weapons before the Battle of Thermopylae.

That gun owners mean what they say in the "assault weapons" context can be inferred from the 5 percent compliance rate achieved by New York's recent registration requirement for such firearms. Or from the

15 percent compliance rate in neighboring Connecticut.

In 1990, even before opposition had become so hardened, California experienced similar resistance to its original restrictions on "assault weapons."

"As a one-year registration period draws toward an end on Dec. 31, only about 7,000 weapons of an estimated 300,000 in private hands in the state have been registered," The New York Times reported.

When New Jersey went a step further and banned the sale and possession of "assault weapons," 947 people registered their rifles as sporting guns for target shooting, 888 rendered them inoperable, and four surrendered them to the police. That's out of an estimated 100,000 to

300,000 firearms affected by the law. The New York Times concluded, a bit drily, "More than a year after New Jersey imposed the toughest assault-weapons law in the country, the law is proving difficult if not impossible to enforce."

Some advocates of restrictions will object that they "don't want to

new ones. That narrative becomes complicated when officials like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo muse that "Confiscation could be an

But let's go with it. So, the government somehow defines "assault weapons" in a meaningful way and bans sales of new ones. How is that going to be effective given the millions of disfavored weapons already in circulation? That includes roughly 8 million AR-15-style rifles

not like they're going anywhere. Plenty of 19th century firearms are still in working condition.

And their numbers will increase, even if commercial production and sales are outlawed. People have been 3D-printing AR-15 lower receivers (the parts legally classified as a firearm) for years. More durable receivers are CNC-milled by hobbyists from partially finished blanks as well as raw blocks of metal. These techniques were developed in anticipation of the laws now proposed, with the specific purpose of rendering them impotent.

Molon labe, remember?

So, a United States the morning after, or a year after, or a decade after a successful effort to ban "assault weapons" will not be the scene of the "domestic disarmament" favored by prominent communitarian sociology professor Amitai Etzioni. It will be more like Prohibition-era America, but with hidden rifles substituting for stockpiled hooch and 3D printers standing in for moonshiners' stills. And probably a bit more tense.

Those defiant gun owners will also be included in the jury pools chosen to sit in judgement of unlucky violators scooped up by law enforcement. That situation will likely replicate the difficulty prosecutors had in getting convictions of Prohibition scofflaws in the

1920s and marijuana law resisters today. "[I]f juries consistently nullify certain types of criminal charges (charges for possession of a small amount of marijuana, for example), this can render an unpopular law ineffective," wrote John Richards at the LegalMatch blog after a jury couldn't even be seated in Montana.

"If you pass laws that people have no respect for and they don't follow them, then you have a real problem," Connecticut Sen. Tony Guglielmo (R-District 35), told the Hartford Courant when large numbers of state residents flipped the bird to lawmakers and defied the new gun law.

Well... yes, you do. And like their restriction-inclined predecessors, gun controllers will have quite a mess on their hands.

Photo Credit: Martin Laco Photography/flickr

J.D. Tuccille is a former managing editor of Reason.com and current contributing editor.

I wonder why some organization (NRA?) hasn't defined the term 'defense weapon''? An AR-15, or whatever, could then be legally defined to be a home 'defense weapon'. The assholes currently using the term 'assault weapon' can't even define what that is, and use the term in the same vein that 'racist' is used to cover just about anything the speaker doesn't like, and terminate a discussion they are losing. Art

"Assault weapon" is a purely cosmetic term. It means a firearm that "looks" like something Rambo would use. That's *all* it means. You could produce a single-shot .22 rifle that "looks" like an AR-15, and left-wing jelly-spines would start to tremble and shriek and drool piss their panties and wring their hands over the scary-looking "assault weapon." I don't know very much about guns, but I know at least a thousand times more about them than the average leftist.

I posted this before that f***ot gummer did.

It's a literal translation of the German "Sturmgewehr", meaning a shorter, -less- powerful weapon better suited than handguns, shotguns or their high powered, long ranged infantry rifles for house-to-house fighting.

"..offering a greatly increased volume of fire compared to standard infantry rifles and greater range than submachine guns." (which fire pistol ammo)

The AK-47 was the Russian response, EXACTLY what they needed to defend their homes.

The crucial distinction that the lib-liars try to conceal is that a true Assault Weapon is a full-auto machine gun while the civilian versions are NOT.

--V.G.Fyodorov Inventor of the first one, 1915

By focusing on the semantics, you entirely miss the point. Mass murderers choose these guns because they are the most effective mass-killing guns available, short of a fully automatic gun. Even more important to the nut jobs, they have that bad-ass look that signals an intent to kill people with military effectiveness. Mass killers probably love the optics more than anything -- they look alarming on the evening news. They look like real ARs and they're physically derived from ARs. That's close enough for the average non-gunner to lump them together.

But it seems pretty clear that the main reason most people, including mass murderers, buy these guns is that they carry that bad-ass people-killing imprimatur. That's what they're all about. That's what has made them so popular, because the .223/5.56 NATO is one of the most useless cartridges for regular civilian purposes. I say that as one who loves those cartridges, and who, until a few years ago, owned a Browning 1885 chambered for .223. I bought it to shoot groundhogs and wound up using it to kill javelina. I've always been into varmint cartridges and that's what a .223 is, derived from the .222 Magnum varmint cartridge.

Despite what the author said in that article that was linked to a day or so ago, my bet is that the number of people who go for the higher-caliber barrels and so on is very, very small. I'd love to see the actual numbers.

The real point is that the Right aims its messages at the brain while the Left goes for the butt, the 'seat' of emotion, as you have just shown. Both sides know which end of their followers' spinal cords control their actions.

Right: What do you think about this? Left: How does this make you feel?

--I.P.Pavlov

No, because the "right," if they were using their brains, would be buying only a tiny fraction of the ARs they're actually buying. The number of people for whom it's a sensible choice of gun is very small.

Unlike Jon Ball, I *do* know guns, and have been hunting, target shooting, and doing some amateur gunsmithing since 1959, when I earned my Marksmanship merit badge in the Boy Scouts. Do you want to get into a debate about how much brainpower is involved in the average AR purchase? Or do you just want to admit now that it's 90% emotion?

I'm not impressed with the right-wing brain.

Of course, *far* fewer actual murders occur due to these guns, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the number of such guns in private possession, than occur with handguns. I venture to say not 1% of gun homicides in the United States are committed using this type of gun.

That's probably accurate, and it was my original reason for editorializing and lobbying against NJ's AR ban (we mostly lost). At the time, around 1990, I asked the NJ State Police officer in charge of providing state firearms data to the FBI/UCR, how many crimes had been known to have been committed with ARs in NJ. "One" was his reply.

That was before they became the weapon of choice for terrorists and mass-murdering nutjobs. They've acquired a cachet for being an outstanding terror weapon, adding to the terror by their appearance, their efficacy, and their history. So they present an entirely different problem than they did in 1990.