The Posse has been remiss in our gun blogging of late – indeed in our blogging overall. What I can say – the weather is nice, and a lot of work remains to be done around the ranch.
Still, a minor tempest over at National Review has bestirred us back to the intertubes to combat a while spray of gun control fiction with careful aimed shots of truth.
At issue is an Al-Qaeda propaganda piece urging the practitioners of the Religion of Peace ™ to give up on bombs and sabotage and basically go on shooting rampages all over our great land. The appeal also contains the handy (mis)information that because America is a free country, you can find assault weapons at any gun show and also the parts to turn them into full-auto killing machines.
Predictably, the anti-gun lobby jumped on this as proof that our laws need to be tighter – no doubt because, being good leftists, they regard Al Qaeda as a reliable source of technical information on all sorts of things.
Anyhow, to his already-growing regret, NRO contributor Cliff May echoed the sentiment.
Rather than dump a (well-deserved) pail of rhetorical excrement over May’s head (agreeing with Al Qaeda?? Seriously?), I will use this as an opportunity to once again knock down some anti-gun myths that are harder to kill than regenerating zombies in full ballistic armor.
In the first place, automatic weapons are awfully hard to get. One must get a Class III license, which is a procedure whose invasiveness compares with a two-hour visit to the proctologist, if you know what I mean. Oh, and like the proctologist, it is rather expensive.
After years of research, I can also say that “conversion kits” are a mythical creation – there is no “drop-in sear” that will magically convert a weapon from one mode of firing to another. Only a trained gunsmith with appropriate tools could make such a conversion. Remember, we are talking about a precision-built machine here, not a magical construct. Just as waving a magic wand is insufficient to change a car’s oil, so dropping a random part in a firearm is insufficient to change its function.
Actually, that’s not strictly true: You can easily jam it by dropping a part that shouldn’t be there into the action.
Which is the second point: Tinkering with a gun is a great way to ensure that it doesn’t work. I for one fully endorse Al Qaeda telling its sympathizers to crack open their AK-47s and start tinkering with the mechanisms. I think it would be swell if terrorists all across the country rendered their rifles inoperable before going someplace public and pointlessly clicking their triggers. Maybe they can shout “BANG! BANG!” while they do it.
This leads to the third point: Full-auto weapons are grossly overrated.
Machineguns are most useful at suppressing enemy fire or repelling a massive attack in force. Think of World War I – style massed infantry assaults. That is when you want full-auto power.
But against individual targets? All you will do is waste ammunition. I’m sure you’ll hit something, but a far deadlier mode of attack is to use single, aimed shots, i.e. what our soldiers do.
Hollywood movies notwithstanding, full-auto weapons pretty much miss individuals. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have run up against lots of locals with full-auto AKs and they can’t hit anything. “Spray and pray” doesn’t work.
Now let us assume that none of the above presents an obstacle to our Brady Center-educated jihadi – that he wants a machinegun anyway. Okay, now he has to find a way to pay for it.
Those horrible, awful “assault rifles” that gun haters always drone on about are actually hideously expensive. Oh sure, you can find an SKS for a few hundred bucks, but the really sexy, scary-looking stuff costs more than a grand. The super-cool stuff will cost you as much as a used car (which incidentally, is easier to buy, use and will probably kill more people if you drive it into a crowd, but let’s not give them any ideas).
This now brings us to the fourth and final point: Our gun laws are actually working. As I noted some years ago, the US government launched an aggressive crackdown on violent parole violators during the Bush Administration. Dubbed “Operation Falcon,” this massive multi-state sting rounded up thousands of hardened criminals – and very few had any guns.
Now think about that for a second. These were hardened criminals, people who had no problem with breaking the law. Yet they are almost entirely unarmed.
Oh, they were willing to have illegal items – drugs were quite plentiful, but guns? Not so much.
My point is that it if is so easy for criminals to get guns legally, how come so few of them did so? How come they were so defenseless?
Think about it: Half of all American households have a firearm of some sort, yet only two percent of these criminals did.
That means lawful guns outnumber unlawful ones by a factor of 25.
I made this point in my earlier posts, but it bears repeating: given that so few criminals have guns, disarming law-abiding citizens actually helps criminals because it evens the score.
These facts have been out there for a while – since 2006, in fact. Anyone who is serious about the issue should know this by now. If they miss it, they are either unserious, or disingenuous.
At this point, we know the gun control lobby is purposefully lying. So what is Cliff May's excuse?
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