Dear America,
On February 16, the day after the murder of seventeen people in a Florida's Stoneman Douglas High School, Senator Marco Rubio spoke passionately before the U.S. Senate about the tragedy. His sincerity was indubitable, and the accuracy of much of what he said cannot be denied. Legislating to the effect of preventing such heinous acts has been impossible given the fact that our constitution proscribes "prior restraint," that is arresting someone because he is likely to commit a crime, and keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill presents its own difficulties. But in one respect however, he overstated the case of his gun-rights advocating constituents.
In 1994, congress passed, and Bill Clinton signed into law, a ban on the manufacture of assault weapons, which included prohibition of the manufacture of high volume magazines for such weapons. But the law had a sunset provision that automatically repealed the ban in ten years, and in 2004 when the ban automatically ended, congress declined to renew it. Proponents of gun ownership cited statistical analyses of various kinds that ensued upon the demise of the ban and I have often heard such gun advocates claim that there was no difference in the use of assault weapons after the ban from what prevailed before it, but their conclusory arguments are elliptical, and in a critical way. The statistics relating to the period before 1994 also demonstrate that assault type weapons were seldom used in crimes, and thus, the fact of a statistically insignificant change--a small variation in a very small number to begin with--is a function only of the rarity of the use of such weapons, not of the ineffectuality of the ban. In fact, The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence study found that the use of assault weapons in crimes in the five years before the ban was just less than 5%. During the ban, weapons like those banned were used in less than 2% of crimes, though similar weapons that snuck through loopholes in the ban were used in about 3.5% of crimes...still a decrease of about 45% of the total. Reducing any negative phenomenon by nearly half is meaningful, even if the total volume of that phenomenon is meager. So consider this.
Of the twenty deadliest mass murders since 1950, only one occurred during the period of the assault weapons ban. Since the ban ended, there have been have been fourteen such rampages. During the ban, there was only one--Columbine--and seven occurred before the ban. And the number of mass shootings tripled between 2011 and 2014, the United States having five times as many as the next most dangerous country, The Philippines...more even than Yemen. But we can all go on and on with statistics making whatever arguments we like. The fact is that people are most likely to be shot in mass assaults at their places of business, or has become so common-place today, at school. That is really the point. We are all vulnerable, even our children.
So, when Marco Rubio bemoans our fate on thee Senate floor, when he invokes the constitutional provision in the preamble that imposes on the congress the duty to protect domestic tranquility and the common good but claims that we have yet to discover a way to do so, he is misinformed. A ban on assault weapons will not prevent such perversity as we say in Friday a couple of days ago, but it will reduce the frequency with which such abominations...such atrocities can be carried out. Rubio did say that our congressmen cannot just throw up their hands and say that there is nothing to be done simply because they don't know what to do. Rubio exhorted his colleagues to try something...at least try, and a new assault weapons ban is a starting point that has proven itself effective in diminishing the number or parents who have to go to their children's funerals. Let's tell our representatives to start there, America. Remember that the first four words of the second amendment are, "A well regulated militia..." not "my cold dead hands."
Your friend,
Mike
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