This is a common sense appeal to ban the sale and eventual possession of assault weapons in the U.S. for other than law enforcement and military uses. It also supports a ban on those aftermarket accessories such as bump stocks that enhance the lethality of unmodified weapons. It does not impede or criminalize the possession of other weapons typically used for self-defense, hunting or sport shooting within federal and state laws. Assault weapons that are privately owned can be retrieved by generous buy-back programs or confiscated when the owner commits a felony for some other reason (e.g., driving under the influence, income tax evasion, domestic violence, etc.) It may take a decade or more to see a marked difference, but it will be a start. Until then, we can all expect future visitations of the Second Amendment Blues.

Madison’s original Second Amendment as proposed to Congress

James Madison wrote most of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution known as the Bill of Rights. He did this at Thomas Jefferson’s behest. Here is what he proposed to Congress, though it was not accepted entirely as he wrote it:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person,”

Here is what it says today (as amended by Congress in 1789):

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“

Obviously, what Madison intended in this amendment, or the in the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, etc. is not important if Congress saw fit to change it. But revisiting the original texts of the amendments that Madison submitted is still a worthwhile exercise.

The problem

As of today, March 10th, 163 men, women or children have been killed by gun violence in mass shooting situations so far this year (and the day isn’t over yet.) Only three weeks ago, the sheer number of Americans killed by guns overall this year was 5,000. Some of these mass shootings involve handguns where a husband murders his spouse and children before turning the gun on himself. In other cases, schools have been shot up and students, teachers and staff have been permanently maimed or killed in a hail of bullets. In still other cases, mass shootings may have occurred at night clubs, grocery stores, shopping centers or malls, at synagogues, churches or mosques, or any other damn place that crossed the twisted mind of the shooter. Call them “random acts of murder” with an apology to Rachel.

There are other ways and other guns that cause the death of innocent people. For example, twenty-year-old Kaylin Gillis was killed by upstate New York resident Kevin Monahan when the driver of the car she was riding in got lost and pulled into the wrong driveway around 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night last April. Monahan could not know for certain why the cars were in his driveway. Nor did he attempt to find out. After all, it was dark, his country home was fairly isolated, and strange and frightful things sometimes happen in those circumstances and environs. He grabbed his gun and rushed out of the house. As he did, the young people in the car who had no felonious intentions in the first place understood they were probably at the wrong address. A second car in the group was following the first vehicle, and once the error was discovered, the vehicles started to back out of the driveway. At that point according to police reports or court testimony, Monahan’s gun discharged twice, and Gillis was shot while sitting in the car. She died shortly after. Monahan initially denied any involvement, suggesting that hunters had fired the shotgun slugs, including the one that lodged in Kaylin’s neck. He also claimed that he was asleep at the time. On yet another occasion, he admitted being outside his house with his gun but stated that the gun had accidentally gone off. Something of a standoff developed between Monahan and the authorities once they arrived and he was noted as being uncooperative with law enforcement personnel. At that point he was arrested.

On January 23, 2024, a jury found Monahan guilty of second-degree murder. Six weeks later, Monahan was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Two years prior to the killing of Kaylin Gillis, the cast of an upcoming movie titled “Rust” was being filmed in New Mexico. Alec Baldwin, an actor in the movie was handed a pistol from assistant director Dave Halls according to accounts and Halls or someone else called out “cold weapon” which identified the weapon as being harmless. In fact, it was deadly. In the process of rehearsing the scene, Baldwin, who did not verify personally that the weapon was not loaded, pointed the gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. At that point, the prop gun discharged, killing Ms. Hutchins. Baldwin denied pulling the trigger, but a subsequent investigation states that the gun could not fire unless Baldwin did pull the trigger. Earlier this year, Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter. The armorer in the production, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, where she is currently serving her term. Baldwin’s trial comes up shortly, unless he is offered and accepts a plea bargain.

What is an assault weapon?

According to a website named after President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary Jim Brady who was shot–but survived–in the assassination attempt on the President:

An ‘assault weapon’ refers to a semi-automatic gun designed for military use and quick, efficient killing. Assault weapons are uniquely lethal because of their rapid rate of fire and high muzzle velocity — coupled with large-capacity magazines, which attach to an assault weapon to allow dozens of gunshots without needing to reload. A large-capacity magazine is typically defined as any magazine or drum that is capable of holding more than either 10 or 15 rounds of ammunition.“

An ABC News report broadcast after the Uvalde, TX school shooting quotes emergency room doctors on what happens after being shot with an assault weapon.

Doctors explained that, traditionally, injuries from handguns leave clean entry and exit wounds or just become lodged in the skin and, because they are traveling at a low velocity, do not cause life-threatening bleeding unless a major organ or artery is hit.

But bullets from AR-15s exit the barrel at three times the speed that handgun bullets exit the barrel. This means that when AR-15 bullets hit the skin, they often leave huge entry and exit wounds that are not clean.

‘When a high-velocity firearm enters a body, it basically creates a wave and a blast,’ Dr. Lillian Liao, a pediatric trauma surgeon at University Hospital in San Antonio — treating four patients from the Uvalde shooting — told ‘Nightline.’ ‘So it looks like a body part got blown up … A handgun may create one small hole, whereas a high-velocity firearm will create a giant hole in the body that is with missing tissue.'”

[See also this program published in the Washington Post to understand and visualize the consequences in much greater detail.]

I remember in Vietnam watching a soldier with an M-16 utterly reduce a cinder block to dust and crumbs in less than two seconds. The rounds from such a gun are designed to destroy an arm or a knee, not just wound it.

Who owns assault weapons

According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 11, 2022:

The survey found that AR-15 owners come from red, blue and purple states. Compared with Americans as a whole, AR-15 owners are significantly more likely to be White, male and between the ages 40 and 65. They’re also more likely to have higher incomes, to have served in the military and to be Republican. And AR-15 owners are more likely to live in states former president Donald Trump won in 2020 than adults overall.“

A third of the 399 AR-15 users in the WP/Ipsos poll said they own an assault weapon for “self-defense, to protect their home, self or family.” Others said it was to hunt with. Others were more nostalgic saying they were veterans who used the weapon in the past. But seventeen percent of the respondents said they owned an assault weapon “because of the Second Amendment and their right to,” or “because they can,” or “to anger liberals,” or “because people want to ban them,” or “because they make other people afraid.”

A call for common sense

We need some common sense. After living for more than six decades in this country, I have heard all the arguments from the gun lobby.

• Our Founding Fathers would want us to have assault weapons, even though they only had single shot muskets that took several minutes to reload back the.
• Assault weapons are often used for hunting (quarry other than people, that is.) How many of us wished we had our trusty Kalashnikov when our back yard was infested by chipmunks? I’ve even heard of people using semi-automatic¹ shotguns to shoot catfish when they ran out of bait.
• Assault weapons can be fired in the air to commemorate special occasions such as weddings, bar-mitzvahs and christenings.
• If we ban assault weapons, then only criminals will have assault weapons.
• If assault weapons were illegal and someone wanted to kill thirty-seven people badly enough, he could do it with a steak knife given enough time and without any resistance.
• Assault weapons don’t kill people. People kill people.
• Banning assault weapons would be the start of a slippery slope. Next, the “govmint” would go after our armor piercing bullets, our silencers, our 3D printed guns that can slip by event security, our bump stocks and so on.
• Banning assault weapons is a communist conspiracy fostered by the democrats.
• Mass shootings and many other murders accomplished with guns are because people have mental health issues that need addressing. The fault is not guns. However, nothing is being done here and Congress and many insurance companies are not keen to support mental health initiatives and treatment
• Citizens implicitly form the militia. The reserves and national guard do not count. In fact, the National Guard units of the several states are the militia.

I know banning assault weapons will impact society. Once we get past the subjective collective sigh of relief (or mourning), we can objectively calculate the losses to gun manufacturers in terms of dollars and the savings of society in terms of lives.

Who owns weapons (including assault weapons)

The completely reliable public opinion foundation Pew Research notes who gunners owners are in America. The results should not be a surprise:

• Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more than twice as likely as Democrats and Democratic leaners to say they personally own a gun (45% vs. 20%).
• 40% of men say they own a gun, compared with 25% of women.
• 47% of adults living in rural areas report personally owning a firearm, as do smaller shares of those who live in suburbs (30%) or urban areas (20%).
• 38% of White Americans own a gun, compared with smaller shares of Black (24%), Hispanic (20%) and Asian (10%) Americans.

A personal witness

When I was a teenager, I had guns myself. My first gun was a .22 single shot rifle when I was about thirteen. Then, a year later I inherited a 20 gauge shotgun from my grandparent. Finally, I purchased a .410 Mossberg shotgun with an adjustable choke. The basement of my high school had a rifle range built into it, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) before it became radicalized would hold classes on the safe handling of firearms for teenagers (myself included) who wanted to get a small or big game license in the state of New York. So, I’ve been around guns most of my life and while I’m hardly an expert, nor am I rabidly against them. I am not against an eligible citizen purchasing a Glock or Beretta to carry with them in their truck or to keep in the nightstand in their bedroom. Guns can save your life and have saved the lives of many, most recently in Joel Osteen’s church. I can generally support the right to carry a concealed weapon if you are properly licensed, though I would not allow guns on school or college campuses unless they are carried by a properly trained employee of that institution. I do not support assault weapons.

On effigies

[You can read a transcript of McConaughey’s White House address here.]

I’ve also wondered what goes through the minds of people who collect guns. What do they look for in a gun? Why do they make the choices that they do? What kind of people are they? I decided to look up targets used in shooting. Most targets are the boring circles where you get more points hitting the bull’s eye than landing a round in the outer circles. Then, there are targets with zombies, dinosaurs, space aliens and such painted on them. But there are also targets of politicians with famous faces for sale, such as Elizabeth Warren, Alvin Bragg, the late Dianne Feinstein, Cori Bush, Sheila Jackson Lee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gretchen Whitmer, Rashida Tlaib, Nancy Pelosi, John Fetterman and President Joe Biden (in blackface, no less.) All democrats except for Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger and a few others republicans (including Donald Trump which was a surprise to me) plus Bill Gates, George Soros and other boogeymen.

Afterword

As women today can tell you, no right in this country is guaranteed. Bill O’Reilly, once a host on Fox responded to the fifty-nine dead in the Los Vegas shoot by saying: “This is the price of freedom. . . Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.”

The question in my mind and which perhaps should be in yours is whether the price is too high.

Footnotes

¹A semi-automatic weapon typically requires that the trigger be pulled for a round to be fired. If you can repeatedly pull the trigger at a high rate of speed, more rounds will exit the gun. With an automatic weapon, you only depress the trigger once. Most weapons legally sold are semi-automatic guns, though there are cheap conversion kits sold to convert a gun to full-automatic.

Additional credits:

Bullet hole graphics credit Seamartini and AlexLMX (iStock.)