The assault on assault weapons

I was deeply saddened and disturbed when I heard about the Newtown massacre. The immediate assault to ban assault weapons and high capacity clips was predictable. It’s all smoke and mirrors as there isn’t any simple solution to the problem of deranged people obtaining weapons in this country. If they don’t obtain “assault weapons” they’ll use whatever they get their hands on.

The shock was that tiny defenseless children were attacked by a madman, who happened to use this type of weapon. If he would have used the shotgun found in his car trunk, would be focus be on banning shotguns?

So the only input I can really make is to provide a practical, relatively inexpensive way to stop any reoccurrence. I’ll discuss later in the article.

As you know, President Obama has decided to try and reinstate the assault weapons ban, and to issue one or more executive orders to reduce access to this type of weapon. It isn’t to stop the mass shootings, but to appear to do something, like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. It may make you feel good, but the ship’s still going down. Even patching a part of the iceberg caused hole doesn’t stop the water pouring in. The “ban” won’t change anything. Anything at all, except push up the prices of used weapons and annoy law abiding citizens.

Although well documented that the prior “ban,” riddled with intentional loopholes, had little or no affect of killings and mass murders, I’m confident that political hysteria will force yet another Republican versus Democrat battle next year.

There was a similar massacre in Scotland in 1996 where another coward killed sixteen young children and a teacher. He had four pistols (no assault weapons) with him, and killed himself before the police could intervene. It’s a shame he didn’t commit suicide before going to the school. Due to similar public outrage the United Kingdom enacted a complete gun ban in 1997, but they found that it had the opposite effect on crimes involving weapons. Crimes involving guns surged. Why? The law abiding British citizens turned in their guns, the criminal element didn’t.

A civilian assault weapon is just a semi-automatic rifle that has a similar look and feel as a military weapon. They shoot exactly the same way as sporting semi-automatic rifles. The sporting rifles just don’t look as threatening. The big difference is the clip size. A sporting rifle may only hold five rounds in its clip, an assault weapons clip, thirty or more.

The theory is that if the allowable clip size was in the single digits, it would stop the mass murders. The trouble is that it won’t. Yes, the shooter will have to change clips, but if he has a pistol it would deter someone from being able to successfully stop the shooter before a five second clip change. Or if he uses a shotgun, a far more lethal short range weapon and continues to hand feed rounds as they are used, it will never run out of ammunition. When that massacre happens, they’ll be calls for shotguns to be banned.

The problem is that the assault weapons and magazine ban did not affect the prior purchasers of these weapons and magazines. It was legal to just keep the weapons disassembled, as was buying used clips. In fact, the police departments made a lot of money selling used clips to gun dealers to resell to the public. It all comes down to supply and demand. No supply, prices surge.

I very much doubt that the government will buy back every “assault weapon,” and ban new purchases. Why? It’ll be bad for business; the public will howl resulting in our congressmen and women risking losing their jobs, and the gun industry could collapse with Americans losing their jobs as well.

Unlike the defense industry that has facilities in all fifty states so that any threat of defense cutbacks will result in howls from every state, the domestic gun manufacturers can’t employ people everywhere to block legislation. Yes, we could completely ban importing foreign manufactured weapons, but what good would that do if it’s okay to build them here? Those manufacturers would just ship the parts here for domestic manufacturing.

I am aware of several facts. One, criminals don’t care what the laws are; only the law abiding public does. Two, the mass murderers are cowards, typically selecting targets that cannot defend themselves as they are in high density gun free zones such as schools, and three, the shooter will frequently commit suicide when the police arrive… too late to make any or a significant difference.

The real debate should be how to safely allow teachers to carry weapons, but as that’s unlikely to be adopted, at least have access to a weapon in the classroom as a last resort. The cowards wouldn’t dare enter schools with evil intent if their intended victims could defend themselves.

One school district in Texas allows teachers to carry weapons. Bravo to them.

One suggested solution, but unlikely is to have two police officers assigned permanently to each of our nation’s public schools. The problem is the ongoing cost. As there are about 75,000 public schools, and two police officers will cost about $150,000 a year in salaries and benefits that will cost over $11 billion dollars each year! That’s about a billion dollars a month or $30 million a day, a huge amount of money being spent as a deterrent, one that may not work as mass murders may be over in five minutes and the officers could be elsewhere in the school, unable to be effective in time.

So here is an actual, practical solution, one that conflates different ideas and will work. A friend of mine has a fancy Lexus. He never unlocks the door as the Lexus key has an embedded chip that detects that he’s a few feet away and opens it automatically. He doesn’t even need to insert the key in the ignition lock but just presses a button to start the engine. The proximity “magic” is what’s known as RFID, Radio-Frequency IDentification.

I suggest that the federal government installs a small safe in every public classroom and pays for each and every teacher to have defensive firearms training, refreshed each quarter. The teachers are given a very short range RFID tag that’s embedded in their ID cards, in addition to a pass-code that will needed to open the safe and provide quick access to the gun inside. It’s called two-factor authentication, one automatic and one manual.

In the event of an intrusion, the children can take cover, and the teacher will have quick access to a weapon to defend them. It’s sad that it comes to this, but we live in a country where obtaining a weapon is very easy and one deranged person can inflict serious damage in minutes. Any weapons ban will be ineffective.

There is a reason that these mentally ill people don’t attack police stations; it’s because they’ll be dead in seconds. In the event they enter a classroom focused on killing our innocent children, they can be shot dead in seconds… which is a good idea.

We live in a very violent society. We use the “War on” metaphor for almost anything – War on Crime, Poverty, Drugs, Terror. It goes on and on, even a War on Christmas and the War on Women! The only constant is the use of the word War. We are not a peaceful country.

TV shows and movies frequently depict gun fights using a variety of exotic weapons where the “bad guys” get killed and the good guys are all smiles and grins afterwards. It doesn’t work like that in real life, but the illusion, the “glamour” of swaggering around with a gun and, I also suspect, the massive increase in the prescription drugs given to young people are the fundamental causes of why these violent acts occur.

Although I’d like to see some statistical correlation of prescription drugs for children and violent crimes, I doubt that the possible links will be investigated, as potentially bad for the pharmaceutical and media industries. If you watch the news shows, you’ll notice that drug advertisements are a major source of revenue. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Smoke and mirrors legislation, stopping the public buying new assault weapons and magazines won’t end gun related violence in our schools. Working on the causes will; letting the teachers defend themselves and their charges will, but I’m afraid that smoke and mirrors will rule the day for political reasons, so that teachers and children under threat will continue to be at risk.