trickybeck wrote:
A third thing that's dumb about this article is the idea that just because the previous legislation mis-targetted cosmetic features of assault rifles, that the new one will too. Who says that her new legislation is going to be identical to the old one?
Because she's re-enacting the same ban. While I'm sure they may attempt some minor linguistic changes, they really are talking about just passing the same law again.
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And if your big problem is that the legislation poorly defines what an assault rifle is, then why wouldn't you argue to improve that definition?
Because while there is an actual definition of "assault rifle", those are already banned (fully automatic rifles btw), there's no functionally useful definition of "assault weapon". The problem is the attempt to come up with a definition which bans "scary guns", which are not fully automatic, without violating the 2nd amendment. This is what the author was talking about. You can't do it. It's like trying to come up with a way to ban "cars that gang members like to drive" as a means of reducing gang violence. It's stupid. It's absurd. Sure, we might be able to point to a car and say "that's the kind of car a gang member might drive", but try actually writing legislative language around that and you'll fail.
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Instead of calling the whole thing worthless? (Obviously - the reason why is because he just wants to advocate pro-gun positions, not to fix the problem).
Try to not think of this based on being pro or anti gun. It's worthless because it is actually worthless. There's no way to do more than ban cosmetic features of firearms via this approach. Trying to do more ends out with too broad a ban which will never pass constitutional muster. These kinds of laws really do end out being attempts to placate anti-gun folks by appearing to do something about the kinds of guns that scare them. And that's just a really really dumb way to approach the issue.