The American Spectator

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Bulleted Brief

1.17.08 @ 12:01AM

FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES
Re: Robert VerBruggen's With Friends Like These...:

I was as astonished by Solicitor General Paul Clement's brief as was Mr. VerBruggen. As noted in an L.A. Times article, "Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence, said he saluted the administration for recognizing a need for limits on gun rights." Like Mr. VerBruggen says "with friends like these..."

But I caution Mr. VerBruggen when he writes "MACHINE guns cannot be traced back to the Founding era." Quite reasonably, one can make the same argument for the 1860 transition to metallic cartridge ammunition, the repeating firearms that used that metallic cartridge ammunition (Confederate soldiers complaining that Federals "would load on Sunday and fire all week"), the 1900 transition to self-loading, semi-automatic pistols and rifles, and the World War I transition to fully automatic firearms of all sizes.

This is not an academic exercise, for this is precisely the argument made by the enactors of the 1994 federal "assault gun" ban, which fundamentally identified semi-automatic, detachable magazine firearms as the subject of strict federal control, you might say because they "cannot be traced back to the Founding era." And just in case the reader might think that a blackpowder flintlock pistol or rifle might escape strict control, take a look at the laws of my home state of New Jersey. Trenton treats such weapons with no legal difference than a latest design Walther or Colt.

And just to put machine guns in perspective, not an easy matter, consider the February 1997 incident in Los Angeles where two bank robbers in full body armor and full auto AK-47s took on Los Angeles police armed with pistols and shotguns. The end result? Both robbers dead, no policemen killed. Intuition and reality are not always the same.

The criteria cannot be tracing back to the Founding era, but rather that the firearm is an individual weapon that can be used to defend one's property, life or essential freedom. Individual (not weapon) licensing and proficiency demonstration may be reasonably written and required. And that is so because it is "necessary to the security of a free state."
-- Frank Natoli
Newton, New Jersey

Mr. VerBruggen, you are reaching just a bit with "The Act required militiamen to acquire weapons that were in common circulation and that individual men would be able to employ, such as muskets, rifles, pistols, sabres, hangers, etc., but not cumbersome, expensive, or rare equipment such as cannons" as a justification for excluding automatic weapons from Constitutional protections. I would remind you of two facts.

First, there were no typewriters, word processors or PCs that could spit out millions of lies and falsehoods a second in 1789 but no one is calming that speech produced by such rapid fire WMD aren't protected under the First Amendment, are they? Exclude John McCain from that thought for this purpose.

Second, what was the purpose of having every able bodied male to have "weapons that were in common circulation" back in 1789? To attend a picnic or go on parades with? Can you tell the difference between a smooth bore Brown Bess musket used by the Colonists and British vs. the civilian version back then? Was there a battlefield difference between military and civilian weapons back then? Most Colonists' weapons were better in ways that mattered. How about the difference between a semi-automatic version of an M-16 and the full automatic "machine gun" version of same? I can assure you that only fools and Hollywood Action Heroes take modern civilian weapons up against the real military weapons ("machine guns -- aka Assault rifles") all else equal and come out on top.

Stop reaching Mr. VerBruggen. The modern pistol is more effective than that 1789 Brown Bess musket but the "weapons in common circulation" by civilians today are quite a bit down the effectiveness scale from the average military weapon "in common circulation and that individual men would be able to employ" against the masses.

You are right, the Bush Administration's argument is stupid. You didn't help the matter if the original intent is to have meaning as it did in 1789.
-- Thom Bateman
Newport News, Virginia

One can only wonder why after a sterling record of supporting the Second Amendment and reversing the Reagan and Clinton era gun control legislation the Bush administration has entered the DC case with such convoluted arguments that condemn the unconstitutional DC law, but urge the court not to sweep aside such nonsense? Pandering to the Brady's and other anti-Constitutional fascists didn't win friends for Ronald Reagan and it won't win them for George W. Bush. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will not only throw out the DC travesty, but secure the sanctity of the Second Amendment as our forefathers envisioned -- a free people are a people with the right to arm and protect themselves.
-- Michael Tomlinson

You should do a better job researching the mechanics, physics, history, and law of firearms. Some glaring inaccuracies:

1. The mechanism of an M-16 does not differ much from a common semi-automatic. Indeed, with a minor modification, many semi-automatics can be converted to full automatic. In point of fact, the mechanism of the common .22 auto and the less common sub-machine gun is almost identical.

2. The Gatling style of full automatic, i.e. mechanically operated, is not regulated as a machine gun by the Federal Government.

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