One shot, one kill. That’s my idea of gun control, though this is plainly not the mainstream view. Most people would call it “fire discipline” or just good aim — or, rather, better aim than I actually possess.
Nevertheless, I can’t take gun control advocates seriously when they talk about banning “assault weapons”. What does “assault weapon” even mean? Taken too literally, it could mean any weapon used to commit assault, from brass knuckles to an AK-47. I could assault somebody with a rolled-up newspaper. If I was a rapist, I’d be assaulting people with my cock; does that make my penis an “assault weapon”? (It’s certainly among the smallest of small arms, a term you’ll see again in this rant.) So, why are we still using vague language laden with weasel words? That’s what conservatives do.
Let’s see gun control advocates talk about banning civilian (including police) possession of semi-automatic firearms. This covers both the AR-15 and the vast majority of handguns.
Do civilians (again, including police as civilians, because fuck the police; they should be demilitarized, if not outright disarmed) really need a pistol that automatically chambers the next round after firing, so that they need only squeeze the trigger in rapid and often spasmodic succession to empty a magazine in seconds? Or a rifle that does the same? Seriously, people: when was the last time you saw a kid shoot up their school with a lever-action rifle or a single-action revolver?
Let’s stop bullshitting and pussyfooting, and make our demands explicit in clear language that permits no ambiguity or misinterpretation. If you’re not serving in the armed forces, you should not be able to kill multiple people simply by squeezing a trigger. You should at least have to manually chamber the next round by thumbing back a hammer or working a lever or bolt.
After all, it’s not like I can keep weapons of mass destruction in my house, even with a Federal permit, let alone own an A-10 Warthog with all of its weapon systems intact. My state’s DMV would shit themselves if my little Nissan Sentra had a rear-mounted M61A1 Vulcan 20mm gatling gun to deter tailgaters. So we already have gun control in the US. The question is what firearms are we willing to remove from civilian hands. I honestly think that we could limit civilian weapons ownership to daggers, swords, maces, staves, spears, single-shot muskets, and flintlock pistols and still not run afoul of the Second Amendment — which only mentions a right “keep and bear arms” without being specific about the nature of the arms the people may keep and bear.
Don’t give me any shit about what the Founding Fathers would have wanted, either. They had their time, and they’re all dead. This is our time now, and our decision to make. The Second Amendment may have been talking about the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and arms in this context probably meant small arms, but small arms in 1789 aren’t anything like what’s available today. Aaron Burr wasn’t packing a 9mm Glock with a 17 round magazine when he whacked Alexander Hamilton. If you showed George Washington an AR-15, let alone its military counterpart, the M16, he’d have a shit hemorrhage.
I know the Framers wanted the citizenry to be able to serve militia duty and be capable of taking on contemporary infantry, but we are long past the time when that sort of thing was realistic. If you want to know what armed resistance by citizens against a professional military looks like, talk to somebody who’s been to Iraq or Afghanistan as enlisted infantry and never rose higher than sergeant. They’d probably tell you that it looks like guerrilla warfare and improvised explosive devices.
Those right-wing militias you read about in the news aren’t militias as the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams might have imagined. They’re would-be domestic terrorists indulging in paramilitary-themed live-action role-playing. Their closet historical parallel is the Sturmabteilung, though the comparison is somewhat generous. They can’t even win against the FBI or the ATF when these agencies stop dicking around, as we’ve seen in Waco and Ruby Ridge, and might have seen against Cliven Bundy and his family if the Feds had any balls. The real militia is the National Guard, and has been for over a century.