The correspondent I mentioned in the post below, after asking me “What is an acceptable number [of injuries from gunshot wounds]?,” also wrote, apropos this post:
Also, regarding the quoting of the police chief-
1) Do you really expect him to say, ‘Nobody has an inalienable right to run around with a gun equipped with a magazine capable of holding multiple bullets and that has a rate of fire above a certain acceptable level!’ Umm, no. It is called a sound bite.
2) Perhaps he is merely allowing himself the same level of hyperbole that the gun advocates (see! I didn’t use the word lobby!) use when they make the claim that restricting assault weapons (even in a flawed way) is tantamount to someone raiding their house looking for illegal bb guns.
This seems to me a mighty casual attitude about the truth. True, sound bites must involve some oversimplification. But here the police chief is describing one thing — semiautomatic weapons — using something that is nearly its antonym, machine guns. A machine gun is defined as a weapon that is fully automatic, not semiautomatic. A semiautomatic is defined as a weapon that is not fully automatic, and thus not a machine gun. (I say “nearly” because the two terms put together don’t cover all guns: there are also revolvers, pump-, bolt-, and lever-action guns, and other types. But they are mutually exclusive, and in important ways the opposites of each other.)
Now it may be hard to come up with a simple soundbite to accurately describe assault weapons, because assault weapons are such a hard-to-define and often ill-defined term. That, I suspect, is the fault of those who introduced these bans. But in any event, it’s no excuse for saying things that are literally false and that convey a materially false impression.
Speaking of hyperbole, I actually haven’t heard “gun advocates . . . make the claim that restricting assault weapons (even in a flawed way) is tantamount to someone raiding their house looking for illegal bb guns.” Perhaps some have made the claim, but it would have been nice if the reader had pointed me to specifics (just as I pointed to specifics in my posts).
But beyond this, surely it would be very bad indeed for us to tolerate government officials’ making materially false statements — and not just obvious hyperbole, but statements whose falsehood is hidden enough from most listeners that it’s likely to mislead them — simply because some unspecified people on the other side have likewise made exaggerations themselves. Surely that is not the way towards rational policy discussions.
Finally, please note that the one distinction that the assault weapons ban does not make is based on a gun’s rate of fire. I know of no evidence that assault weapons have a higher rate of fire than other semiautomatic guns (of which there are many times more than there are assault weapons) that aren’t covered by the assault weapons ban.
The ban does limit magazine size, which my correspondent recognizes is a separate issue. But the overwhelming majority of all shootings in the U.S. involve fewer than 10 rounds (generally the magazine size cutoff in the ban) being fired. When I last checked (in Gary Kleck’s Targeting Guns), nearly all mass shootings were done in circumstances where the shooters had plenty of time to reload. And reloading a semiautomatic gun that has a fully assault-weapons-ban-compliant 10-round magazine takes a second or two. (Of course if the correspondent’s conclusion from this is that he wants to ban all semiautomatics, or all guns “equipped with a magazine capable of holding multiple bullets,” which is to say all guns other than single-shot shotguns or derringers, that’s fine — but then he should acknowledge that he’s advocating much more than just a ban on “assault weapons.”)
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