A few lefty bloggers are stating that the Assault Weapons Ban hysteria is just rhetoric. Good for them. Yglesias tells us that the ban is basically pointless. Mark A. R. Kleiman concurs, in part.

I think more important is that Yglesias writes that the ban is a political loser:

Last but by no means least, gun control is bad politics and, at best, middling policy. The nation’s crime problem should not be dismissed lightly, but compared to other problems we face, it simply isn’t that big a deal. If you had to trade making zero progress on crime control in exchange for making progress on health care and education, you’d be crazy not to take the deal. And what’s more, there are lots of ways to make progress on crime control (the easiest step would be better drug treatment and supervision of parolees) that have nothing to do with gun regulation. The Post’s use of the term “weapons of destruction” to describe the prohibited firearms, meanwhile, is a piece of silly rhetoric worthy of the Bush administration and not of a great newspaper; one that directly recalls the president’s newfound concern about Saddam’s “weapons of mass murder.” In Rwanda they killed an awful lot of people with farm implements; that such things can “destroy” and wreak “mass murder” is neither here nor there from the point of view of designing a regulatory regime.

It’s good to see some on the left not cater to the hysteria. Some on the left get a part of it correct but it’s not a passionate issue for them. Now, if more liberals would arm themselves, we’d be on to something.

Posted in uncategorized on July 20th, 2004 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |