I've seen a number of interesting write-ups come out of this whole thing, but this one actually dates a few months back, to the Aurora, Colorado shooting. It makes the argument why renewing the "assault weapons" ban would accomplish absolutely nothing, and how the original ban was incredibly poorly-written and had little to no practical effect. I wasn't even aware of any of that myself before reading it, but if it's the sort of legislation that people are going to push for again, then it'll do ****-all to solve the actual underlying problems.
The 1994 assault weapons ban was something of a highlight in the occasional disconnect between good politics and good governance.
When you craft a bill that you hope will become a law, there is a section in the bill's introduction that states the bill's purpose. The content of that section is always carries an implicit lie within it. A budget bill, for example, might say that its purpose is to fund the government, reduce deficits over the following [X] years, and lessen the tax burden on citizens. Those are all secondary goals of the bill, at best. If the purpose section of a bill was an honest representation of the bill's goals, then items number one, two, and three would always be, "To pass in Congress, avoid or override a Presidential veto, and survive any potential judicial challenge."
You could write a budget bill that would be the perfect solution to fund the government, reduce deficits, and lessen tax burdens, but if it is rejected by Congress, gets successfully vetoed, or is struck down in court, then it doesn't do anything to advance the stated goals. What do you do? Do you put forward this bill anyway, ultimately wasting your time on legislation that
cannot accomplish anything because it will not carry the force of law? Alternatively, do you water down your perfect budget, to align it with judicial interpretation of the Constitution and existing law and the politics of the legislature and chief executive, so that your bill can pass and do something? If you are willing to compromise, how much are you willing to compromise? Is it enough for your bill to do half of what you had hoped? Is it enough for your bill to do a quarter of what you had hoped? Is it enough for your bill to do one quantum more than nothing toward your stated goals? Is it enough for your bill to do nothing toward your stated goals now, if it lays the political groundwork for a later (possibly much later) bill that can make progress toward those goals?
Now, put yourself in Diane Feinstein's shoes, in late 1993. Mass shootings had affected her constituency twice in as many years, and so she wanted to prevent or mitigate future incidents. She could have crafted legislation as simplistic as Lorric has repeatedly advocated, calling for a total ban on firearms and the confiscation or mandatory buyback of all privately owned guns. Such a law would certainly have had a huge impact on gun violence. Such a bill would never be so much as entertained on a committee schedule, though. Even if it did manage to find enough favor in the committee process to reach the floor of both houses of Congress for a vote, it would have had the support of no more than about ten Senators and forty House members, even in the Democratic majority of 1993/1994.
Feinstein, in crafting the assault weapons ban, had to compromise, straight from the off, to serve the greater purpose of granting the ban the force of law, so that it could do something, anything, rather than nothing. The effect of compromising the ban to the point where it could be reasonably expected to pass Congress and survive judicial challenge led to the class of banned weapon being defined by the superficial (folding stocks) and the extreme (barrel-mounted grenade launchers, a feature conspicuously ignored by your referenced blog post). It's a grim hypothetical to ponder if any mass-murderer would have utilized a barrel-mounted grenade launcher, purchased between the years of 1994 and 2004, to supplement his/her deed, but if there was one such killer who would have added another person to his/her body count with such an attachment, then the 1994 assault weapons ban did its one quantum more than nothing. Certainly, that's a low bar to set, in terms of practical consequence, but it was still a high bar to set politically. The alternatives were overreaching and accomplishing nothing or doing nothing, which always begets nothing. In other words, good politics had to supercede good governance to achieve even so little as to say, "We, as a nation, feel that barrel-mounted grenade launchers only belong in the hands of military and law enforcement, but we're cool with it, if you already own one."
Now, I'll say that my knee-jerk reaction to hearing Senator Feinstein talk about reintroducing the assault weapons ban in the coming Senate session was to call it bone-headed. For the entire ten years that the 1994 assault weapons ban was in place, it was a free cudgel with which Republicans got to beat the living tar out of Democrats. It remains a tool of the gun lobby to promote the notion that there is no such thing as effective gun control legislation (which is only true inasfar as the gun lobby and current interpretation of the second amendment prevent effective gun control from being politically or legally viable). While Senator Feinstein obviously sees the 1994 assault weapons ban as having done at least its one quantum more than nothing, I see it as having been counterproductive, having laid the political groundwork, not for more effective gun control, but for more effective opposition to gun control. By 2004, Democrats had dropped gun control from their party platform, in an effort to stop hemmoraging seats in the legislature, and with their opposition gone, we as a nation, were not willing to renew any part of the assault weapons ban, not even the bit about grenade launchers. I don't like the idea of getting to 2022 and finding that we've made no progress whatsoever in dealing with gun-related problems because the well was poisoned by heavily compromised legislation.
That being said, we haven't seen the text of the bill that Senator Feinstein intends to introduce this time out, and she has made clear that she has changed the ban from the 1994 version. I still don't hold high hopes for it being any more practically effective, since it still has to pass Congress and survive judicial challenge, but it is quite audacious to try to judge a bill before its text is available.
I do think the old assault weapons ban, if reintroduced, could be made more politically effective, though. In
District of Columbia v. Heller, the majority opinion was delivered with a variation of the old adage, "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." Even Scalia knew the ruling in that case was interpreting the second ammendment to state that Congress cannot prevent anyone from buying any type of weapon, from a 0.22 pistol that can barely penetrate heavy paper to a 20mm autocannon pulled from an Apache helicopter. I think that a new assault weapons ban should be crafted specifically to put that ruling to the test. Draw a line in the sand where everyone, or nearly everyone, in the United States will be on the same side. Maybe that's a ban that only does away with 20+mm autocannons and barrel-mounted grenade launchers, which have never (to my knowledge) been used in the commission of a civilian crime. The goal of such a ban would not be to reduce crime, but rather to get one person to commit the crime of buying one of those weapons, so that the Supreme Court can strike down the ban (
D.C. v. Heller, lolz) and get the populace to realize in large enough numbers that the second ammendment is too broad and requires revision, so that, in the future, we can address the issue of gun control in a sensible and effective manner.
