Not So Alt-Weekly Gun Article
SKooBie emails a link to the local not-so-alternative weekly wherein our local reporter, Molly Kincaid, tries her hand at shooting some semi-automatic firearms. Aside from the misleading title of Automatics for the People (again implying the ban affected automatic weapons, which are machine guns), A taste:
When it’s my turn to shoot, the buzz that comes with firing a semi-automatic rifle for the first time is almost an afterthought. While the smokiness of spent powder and the smooth surface of the rifle’s body should arouse a tingling feeling of power or a savage prick of excitement, the concentration required to handle the hefty weapon overpowers any initial sensory stimulation.
Yes, those spray-firing, bullet hoses do require a lot of concentration. More:
Danny Guy, a safety instructor at the range, took care to familiarize me with the intricacies of the M1A rifle, which is the civilian equivalent of the M14, the military’s primary weapon for a few years prior to the escalation of the Vietnam War in 1966. Before each shuddering shot, he reminds me to “align my sights” then “look through the black halo” (a tiny black circular sight that aids in aim) and “undo the safety” then “squeeze through the soft spot and finally, the trigger.” All these steps commingle in my mind as I crouch close to the gun, tunnel my vision through the halo, eyes blurring. Before I know it, I’ve shot the beast of a weapon, and its stock is slamming back into my shoulder, knocking loose my senses from their transfixed numbness. Only then does an ambiguous excitement tempered with relief begin to set in.
Excellent. Good choice of weapon and it sounds like the instructor gave a pretty good lesson. Molly then addresses the Assault Weapons Ban. She then goes down the list of restrictive features and notes that guns with those features could not be sold or manufactured. Actually, a gun that accepts a detachable magazine can have one of those features. Her instructor gets one point wrong:
Flash suppressers (sic), attached to the tip of the barrel to diminish the visible flash, were also forbidden under the ban. “They would be useful at night, for the military, for example. It would keep the enemy from knowing where the fire came from,” says Guy.
Actually, the purpose of the flash suppressor is to hide the flash from the shooter. In a weapon without a flash suppressor, the flash exits the barrel in all directions. This makes it difficult to see. For a military shooter or a competition shooter who needs a little speed, this flash prevents him from maintaining sight picture for follow up shots. The suppressor disburses the flash to the sides of the barrel and out of the sight picture.
On magazines, she states:
The most significant difference in the gun market since the ban expired is the increased capacity space of the magazine (the cartridge which holds the bullets). Before the ban, no magazine could be sold or manufactured (for long guns or handguns) that held more than 10 rounds.
Actually, they could be sold but no new ones could be manufactured. There was no shortage of regular capacity magazines. The only effects of the magazine limit were that the cost went up; manufacturers made new guns that accepted older magazines; and the US military had a difficult time getting its hands on quality magazines (since there was no civilian market, companies stopped making them).
On what people are shooting since the ban expired:
“We haven’t seen much of a change in the weapons people use here [since the ban expired] because so many people had licenses to shoot these guns during the ban,” says Guy of the significant loophole in the legislation.
I was unaware shooting and owning a gun required a license. There was no loophole in the ban. It was just bad law all the way around. The assault weapons issue was invented in the late 1980s when gun ban groups realized that they were losing (and badly) at their goal of banning handguns. They invented the term. The weapons covered by the ban merely looked like military assault rifles but were functionally identical to your daddy’s semi-automatic Browning deer rifle. In fact, congressional staffers came up with the list of 19 banned weapons by looking through gun magazines and highlighting the ones that looked mean. If you were pro-gun, it was bad law because it restricted the aesthetic features your gun could have. If you were anti-gun, it was bad law because it didn’t ban semi-automatic weapons. The ban was watered down because there was no way it would have passed through Congress otherwise. Also, the 10 year sunset was added to get it to pass. The assault weapons ban was a purely symbolic gesture to rally the gun control crowd.
I found this particularly interesting:
The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, which provides background checks for all guns purchased in Tennessee, gives statistics that would tend to further the notion that the ban’s expiration was a mere blip on the radar of the gun world. Records from October 2004 show that TBI processed 20,484 total firearms—only a handful more guns than the 19,499 they processed in October of 2003, when the ban was still in effect. Not exactly a sales boom.
Not a significant jump, which I find odd. I had to wait three weeks to get a lower receiver for an AR15 and I had to wait nearly a month for a 30 round Ruger 10/22 magazine. The number from the TBI doesn’t represent people like me who went out and bought some items related to the restricted features (like folding stocks) or who bought regular capacity magazines.
She then discusses something we agree on, some weirdos at the gun show. I was there, too bad she didn’t chat me up. And she addresses the private party transfer section of the Brady Bill, which reporters refer to as the gun show loophole. Or as I call it lawful commerce.
I think she tried to be fair but, given her limited knowledge of guns, may have mixed up a few terms. Overall, I respect any read about the issue that doesn’t repeat anti-gun talking points and isn’t hysterical in nature. Good for Molly.
