The Need for Semi-Automatic "Assault" Weapons

By now, we’ve heard the argument about semi-automatic "assault" rifles: nobody needs one. we’ve heard the only reason why someone would obtain this kind of weapon is so they can kill people, which is far from the truth. We’ve also heard the argument from both the Left and the Right that a pistol is how someone protects their home.

"I really don’t know why people need assault weapons. I’m not a hunter but I understand people who want to hunt," Republican Rep. Peter King said on Morning Joe earlier this week. "I understand people who live in rough neighborhoods or have a small business and want to maintain a pistol to protect themselves as long as they’re properly vetted and licensed. But an assault weapon? "

While the use of pistols in the home are helpful, they’re not the best weapon to use when it comes to protecting property. This is why people need a semi-automatic rifle which yes, can come in the form of an AR-15.

Let’s go back in history for a moment. While everyday life in America compared to the rest of the world is pretty darn easy and relatively safe, the reality is things can change overnight, regardless of whether you live in a decent neighborhood. Take for example the Los Angeles riots in 1992, when business owners were forced to defend their property from angry mobs causing severe chaos: $1 billion in property damage, 50 dead, 4,000 injured, 3,000 fires set and 1,100 buildings damaged. In this case, a handheld pistol was in no way sufficient, but semi-automatic rifles were.

Business owners in LA’s Koreatown knew what was coming their way, so they armed themselves with shotguns and semi-automatic rifles in order to defend their property. They stood on their rooftops as they watched black smoke pour down the street. The cops weren't there to help them.

“One of our security guards was killed,” Kee Whan Ha told NPR in April 2012, 20 years after the riots took place. "I didn't see any police patrol car whatsoever. It's a wide open area. It was like the Wild West in the old days, there was nothing there, we were the only ones left."

Business owner Richard Rhee felt the same way and told the Los Angeles Times, "Burn this down after 33 years?... They don't know how hard I've worked. This is my market and I'm going to protect it."

“Assault weapons” saved Koreatown and it’s fair to say the people holding them saved the lives of many that day.

Then of course, there was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. New Orleans became a place of complete anarchy in a matter of hours. In addition to property owners being forced to stave off mobs of people roaming for food, water and shelter to survive as the government failed to provide emergency services, they had to protect themselves against dangerous looters. But not only were New Orleans residents forced to defend themselves against immediate threats to their person and property, residents also had to protect themselves from the government.

As the water started to recede, leaving New Orleans a chaotic wasteland, police officers began going door to door confiscating weapons. Who did they take them from? Mostly poor black residents in New Orleans' 9th Ward.

The New York Times reported in September 2005, “No civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns or other firearms.” The paper pointed out that rich residents and business were allowed to hire hundreds of security guards with firearms to protect them. Sadly, the poor in New Orleans didn’t have the same luxury.

Superintendent of police at the time P. Edwin Compass III said, “Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons.”

What happened days before weapons confiscation was tyranny of the worst kind. Henry Glover, a 31-year-old black man was shot and killed by New Orlean’s police officers. They also burned his body.

When politicians and gun grabbers tell us we “don’t need” semi-automatic, "assault," or "military style" weapons, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

As some of my fellow DU lurkers will attest to, that place has been in threat level red hysterics since Newtown.

The gun grabbers are at their peak of self-righteous, using armor piercing juvenile mockery against their statistics armed gun owner fellow Dems.

But...my favorite hypothetical question thread was...

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Wouldn't banning smoking save more lives than banning guns?

Even though more people die every year from 2nd hand smoke (49,000) than die from all gun deaths including suicide. And 400,000 die from direct smoking. Only 30,000 die from guns and most of those are from killing themselves which is basically what smokers do.

Only 11,500 murders by guns a year but 49,000 people dead from second hand smoke. 49,000 innocent people killed by smoking each year.

Wouldn't we be better focusing on banning smoking than guns? So ban smoking first and then lets work on guns.

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Here's what I find so intriguing about reading their comments.

The most obvious is their unwillingness to acknowledge the very unique status gun ownership has protected by the Constitution.

But the really uncomfortable part of the question has to do with a huge hypocritical Dem stance between smoking and guns.

If Dems are really interested in saving lives...ban smoking. But they can't because of the tax revenue. The truth is, Dems need more smokers. They are comfortable with the level of smoking deaths as long as there is substantial tax revenue from it.

Getting kids hooked on smoking creates another lifelong host for the government tax parasite.

But most of the Dems want to compare cars and guns, and which has a greater "need" in society, rather than questioning the wisdom of "Gun-Free Zones", and funding health care with tobacco tax revenue...need more smokers...and now they want to tax bullets...

(PS - I have no idea of the validity of the stats provided, and no one seemed to question them on the thread. For me...they weren't the point.)

I usually have great admiration for King, but on this issue I have nothing but utter contempt for him. First of all, the last I recall the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution are called the "Bill of RIGHTS" not the "Bill of Needs." I feel pretty confident about that, having graduated from law school and having passed 4 bar exams...but I could be wrong. Maybe Rep. King can point out where I missed something. King has clearly forgotten that he is in Washington to represent his constituents as a public SERVANT, not to lord it over all of us as one of our masters who determines what he believes our needs may be.

By the way, having a requirement to be licensed to own a handgun removes owning it from being a right, and changes it to a privilege. Again, my memory may be faulty, but I don't remember hearing about any "Bill of Privileges" while in law school or since.

Taking a slight detour (which King, based on his remarks, probably would like to take), there are many proposals for "reasonable" regulation of firearms, including a national database. I'm in favor of that - right after we produce a national database of all prayer books across the country...after all, the 1st Amendment needs to be taken care of before the 2nd. YES, I'm being sarcastic.

I had this conversation with someone about a week ago. What King and others like him either don't know due to ignorance, or wilfully ignore (I suspect the latter among any educated person) because they can't face the truth, is that the Founders didn't propose and ratify the 2nd Amendment so that Elmer Fudd could shoot Bambi in the 21st century with a Brown Bess musket or its equivalent (although I have no problems with that, even though black powder guns are not my thing). Let's look a bit at the times and the men involved:

The vast majority of those who voted to ratify the 2nd Amendment, both in Congress and the state legislatures, had served in some capacity in the Revolutionary War (it had, after all, ended only 10 years earlier). Many of the leaders had prices on their heads, and they had all lost family and/or friends in the struggle. That struggle was nothing less than an insurrection against the then-most powerful empire in the world, a revolt against a tyranny imposed on the colonists by what was considered by most to be the legitimate government. We lost about 25,000 dead due to combat and related disease during the war, roughly 1% of the population - equivalent to about 3,100,000 dead today, in 6 years of combat operations. That is about 55 Vietnams. In other words, the price was very high. Then these revolutionaries went about creating a government that would embody the ideals of the Revolution. That necessarily meant that there would be a weak central government, one incapable of imposing tyranny like the British did. Well, that experiment (the Articles of Confederation) failed because it was too decentralized and the states had a perpetual series of trade wars with each other. OK, back to the drawing board. In 1787 they created the Constitution. They purposely gave the government limited powers, and then split those powers between 3 branches of government that they presumed would jealously guard their power from each other. A good start, but still several states refused to ratify it unless there were further safeguards against government power...which is where the Bill of Rights comes into the equation. These rights were deemed to be so critical to the existence of a free society that they were specifically carved out as being beyond government power (or within certain very strict parameters, like the takings clause of the 5th Amendment). The 2nd was modeled on the Swiss militia system, wherein each male of appropriate age (generally between about 18 and 45) was part of the militia. Note that in Switzerland to this day hundreds of thousands of men in the militia have their FULL AUTO rifles at home. The 2nd Amendment was deemed to be the final backstop to prevent tyranny - and Madison's essay in The Federalist Papers #46 is proof of that. Here is the operative paragraph:

The only refuge left for those who prophesy the downfall of the State governments is the visionary supposition that the federal government may previously accumulate a military force for the projects of ambition. The reasonings contained in these papers must have been employed to little purpose indeed, if it could be necessary now to disprove the reality of this danger. That the people and the States should, for a sufficient period of time, elect an uninterupted succession of men ready to betray both; that the traitors should, throughout this period, uniformly and systematically pursue some fixed plan for the extension of the military establishment; that the governments and the people of the States should silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads, must appear to every one more like the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy, or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, than like the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism. Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it. Let us not insult the free and gallant citizens of America with the suspicion, that they would be less able to defend the rights of which they would be in actual possession, than the debased subjects of arbitrary power would be to rescue theirs from the hands of their oppressors. Let us rather no longer insult them with the supposition that they can ever reduce themselves to the necessity of making the experiment, by a blind and tame submission to the long train of insidious measures which must precede and produce it.

Additionally, what most people don't know, mainly because they've never actually read the document, is that the Declaration of Independence is the manifesto for revolution - and these men, who had lost loved ones, lost fortunes and blood, knew the nature of government well. They knew that future generations of leaders might not share their ideals, so they had the wisdom to preserve in the law the instruments of revolution among the population - first, as a deterrent to abuses of power and second, as a means to resist and overthrow tyranny.

As to the argument that the 2nd only protects muskets, that is easily disposed of: first of all, many of the colonists had rifles (which, by the way, were technologically SUPERIOR to the muskets carried by the British Army - so much for the proposition that the Founders never intended for the people to possess weapons as advanced as the armed forces use), and lived in a time of rapid technological change. There was even an automatic weapon, the Puckle Gun, designed in 1718, and one later developed that the Continental Congress knew about:

"In 1777, Philadelphia gunsmith Joseph Belton offered the Continental Congress a "new improved gun", which was capable of firing up to twenty shots in five seconds, automatically, and was capable of being loaded by a cartridge. Congress requested that Belton modify 100 flintlock muskets to fire eight shots in this manner, but rescinded the order when Belton's price proved too high." (See the Wikipedia article on the "Machine Gun").

In addition to the knowledge of automatic weapons, there is the common sense of knowing that material items change with technological progress, and that the law must be flexible enough to accomodate that progress. Just as the 1st Amendment protects the Internet from government censorship, and the 4th against wiretaps of cellphone communications (both in theory, of course), so does the 2nd protect our right to modern weapons. It can be no other way - how could the nation's militia possibly fight off a modern invader or tyrant with 18th Century weapons? When the gun-grabbers want to limit the 1st Amendment just as they propose to limit the 2nd, maybe then we can have a serious conversation (and, btw, I'm in favor of limiting NEITHER).

Rep. King needs to take his head out of his statist arse, read the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Federalist Papers, and then reassess his views. Either that, or resign.

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