Vice President Biden’s gun violence task force is reportedly
going to give its recommendations to President Obama tomorrow,
kicking off the next stage of the gun control debate. President
Obama — aided eagerly by his media cohort — will try to convince
people that this is an immediate crisis with his characteristic
insistence that “we can’t wait” for Congress to pass a new “assault
weapons” ban.
As the Washington Post wrote in a Saturday editorial,
“The opportunity to do something serious about gun violence must
not be lost.” The definition of what is “serious” — what would
actually help prevent another Newtown-like school massacre — is
being shaped by the left to exclude anything other than gun
controls. So far, there’ no competing idea from the gun advocacy
groups or Republicans who will have to fight Obama’s ideas on the
floor of the House and Senate.
While Obama and the rest are busy convincing people that only
they are “serious,” gun control opponents are cornering themselves
by limiting their opposition to a debate over whether we have more
or fewer guns in private hands and in or around schools. That’s bad
politics and a strategy that will ensure defeat. They have to do
better.
To limit the debate to “more versus fewer guns” produces
absurdities such as the one adopted last week by the Montpelier,
Ohio Exempted Village Schools Board of Education. They
voted to allow janitors to carry guns in school to defend the
students against crazed murderers such as Adam Lanza of Newtown
infamy.
Armed janitors? We can’t have a member of SEAL Team 6 in every
school in America, but we have to do a lot better than the idiotic
ideas of arming janitors or teachers.
When Obama announced the Biden task force in December, he told
us the conclusions he wanted: a ban on assault weapons and
high-capacity magazines, elimination of the exemption from
background checks for private sales at gun shows, and something —
anything — to spend more on mental health treatment.
Biden, who tipped his report last week, will recommend what
Obama told him to last month. After Biden reports, and Obama
endorses his recommendations, the congressional gun controllers
will add their own ideas. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) wants
owners of “assault weapons” to have to register them on a federal
database. Her definition of “assault weapons” includes
semi-automatic pistols capable of holding magazines with a capacity
of more than ten rounds. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wants
background checks on the sale of ammunition. Others may propose
prohibitive taxation on the sale of weapons and ammunition.
Meanwhile, there are no counter-proposals from gun control
opponents.
This sets up a replay of the Obamacare debate. Republicans were
accused daily of failing to offer a counterproposal (though some
did) and the debate proceeded on Obamacare as an all or nothing
choice for Congress. The media ensured that. Without a
counterproposal actively advocated by conservatives, the gun
control debate will proceed on the same lines. Opponents of Obama’s
and Feinstein’s proposals will be isolated and demonized.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, there are serious solutions that
would likely prevent mass murders such as the Newtown massacre.
First and foremost is to get the dangerous mentally ill off the
streets. For the past forty years or so we’ve been so busy
protecting the civil rights of the insane that we now have state
systems that make it almost impossible to involuntarily commit the
dangerously insane. These people, as forensic psychiatrists agree,
can be identified before they act because they fit a fairly clear
profile. It’s time for the states to take decisive action by
changing their laws and spending the money that’s required to take
these people out of circulation and house (and treat) them in
adequately secure facilities.
And there’s more the states have to do, such as implementing the
plan authored by former SEAL Dale McClellan that I
described in December. It will cost a lot of money, but it will
be effective and it won’t infringe on the Second Amendment. Those
are serious proposals that should be at the center of the case gun
control opponents make.
Gun control opponents aren’t opposed to background checks,
because we believe that the dangerous mentally ill, criminals, and
illegal aliens shouldn’t be able to buy guns. If the gun show
exemption is to be changed it should be replaced by a quick and
cheap system that sellers and buyers can use at gun shows. But
that’s not what the liberals want.
People such as Sen. Blumenthal want background checks to be
slow, burdensome, and expensive. It’s a backdoor to another
“waiting period” requirement that will delay gun purchases for
hours, days, or weeks. The last time I purchased a weapon the
background check took about five minutes. That’s reasonable, and
that speed has to be preserved in any expansion of the
requirement.
That can and should be done but the states need to do better in
reporting the dangerous mentally ill so that they can be barred
from purchasing firearms. Seung-hui Cho, the man who committed the
mass murder at Virginia Tech in 2007, had been diagnosed with
severe mental illness, but his condition wasn’t reported to the
right people, so he bought his guns despite the background
check.
The “assault weapons” ban Obama and Feinstein want is another
unserious solution to the mass murder problem. So is Feinstein’s
idea that “assault weapons,” including most semi-automatic pistols,
should be registered with the federal government. Newtown murderer
Adam Lanza — already diagnosed with severe mental illness — stole
the weapons he used from his mother, who had obeyed Connecticut’s
stringent gun control laws and registered them. People such as
Lanza, Holmes, and Cho will always be able to steal weapons from
others if they can’t get them legally. This is why, when Feinstein
initially proposed her new “assault weapons ban,” she included the
idea that eventually possession of them would be illegal.
The only way to stop the use of “assault weapons” in these mass
murders is to confiscate them, an unconstitutional infringement on
our Second Amendment rights as Justice Scalia wrote in the DC
v. Heller decision. A ban on their sale is also
unconstitutional. As Scalia wrote:
It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in
military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the
Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory
clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the
time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all
citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of
lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may
well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias
in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are
highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no
amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and
tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the
degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right
cannot change our interpretation of the right.
Scalia also wrote that the prohibition of carrying firearms in
sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, and
other reasonable restrictions, are constitutional. His decision is
serious, and any gun-oriented solutions to mass murders have to be
consistent with it.
There is a need for serious action, but it’s not a question of
more or fewer guns in the hands of Americans. The serious action
needed urgently is to get the dangerous mentally ill off the
streets and make schools a harder target. Nothing else — certainly
not the demands Obama will make — will do anything to prevent
another Newtown-like massacre.
