A new anti-gun bill is about to be introduced in Congress. The Gas-Operated Semi-Automatic Firearms Exclusion (GOSAFE) Act is the work of Senator Angus King of Maine and Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.
You can see a breakdown of the provisions of the bill here.
The bill effectively outlaws all semi-automatic rifles on the basis of how they function (rather than in the usual way, by listing particular firearms by name). It also lays the groundwork for easily extending that ban to handguns as well.
On the one hand, I suppose it’s encouraging that progressives have admitted that they should at least try to understand a technology that they want to ban.
On the other hand, it’s discouraging that they remain unable to process even the simplest logical arguments, like:
Why do the police have these weapons? To protect themselves and others from people who are doing bad things. That’s why citizens need to have them, too. Except in the latter case, ‘people who are doing bad things’ may include the government.
When you hear someone like Senator King or Senator Heinrich saying in public that the police (including federal agencies, like the FBI) don’t need to be armed — because it should be sufficient for them to simply tell bad guys to stop what they’re doing — then you’ll know that they believe their own arguments, which won’t make them any less insane. Just more logically consistent.
Anyway, it’s time to point out once again that the way to react to this kind of thing is not to just engage in politics as usual, kill the bill, and hope that it won’t come back.
We know from experience that it will come back, year after year, and just the fact that it will keep being discussed will start to lend legitimacy to the lunatic idea that a person’s employees can have more rights than the person himself.
If proponents of civilian disarmament keep tossing mud at the wall, eventually, some of it will stick. Because that’s how mud works — on the basis of repetition, not reason.
So even if you don’t want more freedom and just want the same amount we have now, you have to demand more than you want.
According to one of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, you can’t ever get anywhere because first, you have to travel half the distance to your goal; then you have to travel half the remaining distance, and again and again, always going halfway from where you are to where you want to be.
There are ways of resolving the paradox mathematically by using the concept of limits, but there’s a simpler way to deal with it, which is just this: To get to where you actually want to be, make your first step an attempt to go twice as far. Then, going half of that distance takes you all the way to your goal.
I think one of the reasons that progressives continue to make progress while conservatives continue to lose ground is that progressives are always asking for twice what they want, while conservatives normally ask for what they think they can get — which, as often as not, is nothing at all.
In the case of gun control, progressives will ask for anything they can dream up — bans, taxes, capacity limits, registration, storage requirements, universal background checks, mandatory liability insurance, and so on. What’s halfway to that? Something like a Red Flag Law.
Conservatives, on the other hand, will ask for things to remain as they are. But in politics, as in Wonderland, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. So, halfway to where you are is somewhere behind you. And what’s there? Something like a Red Flag Law.
What conservatives should be asking for are things like the repeal of NFA34, the repeal of GCA68, the elimination of ATF, and a lot more, including:
- Free ammo (e.g., 500 rounds per year for every gun that you own)
- Free targets (including steel targets, which are too expensive for many people to buy)
- Free holsters and slings
- Free optics (scopes, red dot sights, tritium front sights)
- Free hearing protection
- Free gun cleaning supplies
- Free shooting range memberships, including to ranges now exclusively available to law enforcement
- Required carry of firearms in public (with a monthly fee that you can pay to be relieved of the responsibility)
- Required militia mustering (ages 16 to 76) for towns with more than 50 people
- Militia training to be provided by the National Guard
- Minimum demonstrated shooting ability to qualify for voting, adoption, foster care, teaching licenses, and so on
- Armed teachers and administrators in schools
- White flag laws (encouraging people to report anyone they think might be going around unarmed, skipping musters, and so on)
- Mandatory gun safety and marksmanship training in schools
And conservatives should be asking for those things even though they don’t expect to get them and even if they don’t really want them. Because what’s halfway to an agenda like that? A much freer country.
More to the point, what’s halfway between what these things and what progressives are asking for? A somewhat freer country.
Just as the Democrats have piles of anti-gun bills sitting around waiting to be dusted off when an opportunity appears, Republicans ought to have piles of pro-gun bills sitting around waiting to be used to counter-balance these anti-gun bills. You want A, B, and C? Well, we want P, Q, R, S, T, U, and V.
These bills would, of course, all need to have names centered on increasing public safety: The Keep Children Safe Act, the Emergency Preparedness Act, the Responsible Citizens in Positions of Responsibility Act, and so on.
It’s important to note that I’m not saying that bills like this would pass into law or even that they should pass into law.
What I am saying is that it would be productive to force supporters of gun control to spend their limited time, energy, and money fighting against such bills and instructive to observe and collect their arguments as to why it would be wrong to take their money and restrict their liberty to promote ends that they abhor — so that they can, in effect, be forced to testify against their own bills.
