Op-Ed: Pistols and rifles and cans, oh, my!

10:44am Wednesday, September 01, 2004

August 29, 2004
The Daily Camera

by Jon Caldara

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The so-called assault-weapons ban is about to sunset. About time.

It was one of the goofiest gun laws on the books. It outlawed guns because they look mean — the perfect law for a superficial world.

The assault-weapons ban was racial profiling for guns.

Before we start, you should know I used to be like you when it came to firearms. I had a religious-like hatred of guns. In fact, I was a member of the anti-gun organization Handgun Control Inc.

It was a long slow, conversion for me, spurred by the patient influence of my older brother Paul, who bought a gun. We weren't raised with guns. I thought he was nuts.

He slowly taught me guns don't have free will. Mean-looking guns are not actually mean. We'd argue back and forth about gun-violence statistics and gun policy. Which just led me to do my own research and reach my own conclusions — guns are not evil, only people are.

Click on the "Read More..." link below for more.

Slowly my emotionalism was over taken by reason. I ended up buying my own gun, a .22-caliber rifle (the perfect first gun for anyone, by the way), and became a target shooter. I am now a member of the NRA, an organization that anti-gun emotionalists put on par with the Ku Klux Klan.

And while many people treat guns like swastikas, or some hate-filled symbol, they're not. They are just inanimate chucks of metal. And different ones fill different niches. My .22 defends me from marauding soda cans. It is what's known as a "plinker," cheap to own and shoot. Back when I had time, I'd go up in the hills and shoot pop cans and pine cones.

I have a pistol for target shooting, which is a fancy, and pricey, way of punching holes in paper at various distances. I just picked up a shotgun for shooting clays. That's where you hit flying clay pigeons, an illegal activity now that Boulder is a wild-bird sanctuary.

Point being, like in any sport or activity, different equipment is used for different things. Those into the sport know the differences. A fisherman knows a fly rod is different from a casting rod, a golfer knows a sand wedge is different from a seven-iron, but an onlooker may not.

The very term "assault weapon" is a politically manufactured term made to emotionalize a certain look of a gun. What is an assault rifle? Emotionalists answer that the same way social conservatives define pornography: I know it when I see it.

But technically an assault weapon is a gun that was made illegal decades before Clinton's law. It is a fully automatic gun (one trigger pull will shoot many bullets) with a detachable magazine or a semi-automatic gun (one trigger pull will shoot only one bullet) that can be set to full auto.

Emotionalists say that these guns used high-powered ammo. Nope. Those mean-looking guns use mid-sized ammo, nothing compared to what the average hunting rifle takes.

Clinton's law outlaws guns by how they look, not what they do. Mostly, if the gun has a "plastic" look, it was banned. For instance, it outlaws the AR-15 by name. This is the semi-automatic rifle that looks like the M-16 our troops use. Yet other semi-auto guns with detachable magazines that shoot the exact same round, like the Mini-14, are still legal.

What's the difference? The Mini-14 comes with a friendly-looking wood stock. Watch out for those dangerous polymer stocks. They are maybe more durable, but they're evil. Somehow.

Some stocks fold up to save space. That, too, looks mean and is therefore against the law.

Guns don't kill people. Apparently pistol grips do. I prefer a rifle with a pistol grip. I find it gives me better control when shooting. Folks say the same kind of thing about parabolic skis or oversized tennis racquets.

Flash-suppressers are not silencers. A flash-suppresser at the end of a barrel keeps the barrel from riding up when shooting and directs any muzzle flash away from the shooter's line of sight. But to a non-shooter it looks like a silencer.

These features make a gun an assault weapon? According to the law, they do.

And the silliest part of this whole thing is that these mean-looking guns are used in only a small fraction of gun-related crimes.

If you still have to outlaw something that looks nasty, ban Ted Kennedy.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Golden. He can be reached at [email protected].

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