Gun Control and the Progressive Soul
With Democrats in control of the U.S. House of Representatives beginning in January, we can expect to see a lot of aspirational legislation coming out of the lower chamber in 2019. Much of it should be revealing of the character of our Progressive representatives. For example, Rep. Eric Swalwell recently detailed his proposal to ban assault weapons: following on the rousing success of our Wars on Drugs and Terror, Swalwell wants a War on Assault Weapons.
First, as usual, it’s important to note in Swalwell’s article the total absence of a thoughtful case for an assault weapon ban. Swalwell uses the example of a man, Gary Jackson, who was killed in retaliation for reporting another man to police for owning an illegal sawed-off shotgun. Jackson’s killer used an AR-15 — “he never had a chance.” But it’s also true that Jackson wouldn’t have had a chance if his murderer had used any of hundreds of other means of killing — he might as easily have been stabbed, run down with a car, poisoned, or shot with a black powder musket. The point of Swalwell’s Gary anecdote is not to illustrate any particular danger of any firearm, but to make the reader sad enough about senseless death to be sympathetic to Swalwell’s proposal.
I’ve written extensively about how an assault weapon ban is unlikely to prevent any gun violence — other types of firearms, like hunting rifles, shotguns, and semiautomatic pistols are equally deadly and in many cases are cheaper and easier to obtain, use, and conceal than assault weapons. The shooters at Columbine, Virginia Tech and, most recently, Thousand Oaks were extremely deadly using pistols. Banning assault weapons would mean, at best, that deranged murderers would use a different type of gun — the families of people who were killed by a Glock 17 pistol are unlikely to care that their loved ones were not victims of that horrible assault weapon, the AR-15.
But much more disturbing than Rep. Swalwell’s ignorant legislative proposal is his description of what happens after assault weapons are banned. After the ban, he writes, “we should buy back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons.”
As Swalwell notes in his article, there are about fifteen million Americans who own what he describes as “military-style assault weapons.” After offering to buy back these weapons for two hundred dollars — about twenty percent of their value — the next step would be to “go after the resisters.”
Swalwell doesn’t say how many people he expects would keep their weapons and resist the ban. But he clearly expects some people to resist. So let’s start by stipulating wildly optimistic levels of cooperation — assume that nine hundred ninety-nine of every one thousand assault weapon owners accept an eighty percent loss on their investment and sell back their weapon. If Swalwell prosecutes and imprisons one resistor out of every thousand assault-rifle owners, that means imprisoning fifteen thousand Americans whose only crime is failing to abide by a regulation — they haven’t hurt anyone, and there is no evidence they ever would. They are innocent people who are responsibly using a dangerous product, punished not for what they’ve done but to frighten everyone else into submission. This is a page taken directly from the War on Drugs playbook; it is not a humane or admirable way of disposing of human lives.
But is 99.9% compliance even remotely close to realistic? We can’t honestly expect that only one out of a thousand assault weapon owners would refuse to give up the guns — ten out of every one thousand Americans have schizophrenia; and thirteen of every one thousand lottery winners fail to collect their prizes. People aren’t more likely to give up their guns than they are to collect free money.
Any owner of an assault weapon has spent something like one thousand dollars for the gun, and more for ammunition and storage. With that money they could have bought a new iPad Pro, collectible Air Jordans, or a new puppy — they have the assault weapon instead. In order to choose to purchase an assault weapon instead of any of those things, the gun owner must have developed some positive idea about the utility of the weapon. Whatever the reason — to use for home defense, or for Instagram — it’s fair to say that not one of them bought the gun so they could sell it back to the government at a substantial loss. For those who bought an assault rifle because they wanted the ultimate responsibility for their own security and protection, it’s fair to say that they never planned to give up the gun for any reason at all. A ban on these guns isn’t just a request for a consumer product — it’s a request that individuals give up the absolute control of their lives that was likely why they decided to invest in the weapon in the first place. Under these circumstances, the optimistic 99.9% compliance rate should be dramatically revised downward.
I think a more reasonable rate of resistance for an assault weapon ban might be more like one out of three. If one-third of the country’s fifteen million assault weapon owners resist — and few people are better prepared for resistance, both materially and psychologically — that’s a population of five million that Rep. Swallwell intends to imprison in his pursuit of “averting carnage, heartache and loss.” That would be twice the highest population in the Soviet gulags, and it would triple the U.S. prison population — so much for liberal opposition to mass incarceration.
And that doesn’t include the collateral effects of jailing an additional two percent of the U.S. population for non-violent crimes, but these might be considerable. For example, not all gun owners who resist will do so passively — remember that the massacres at Ruby Ridge and Waco began as gun confiscations, of which Swalwell envisions millions more. Add in the family and friends of those killed and arrested in the confiscation campaign and there’s a population of tens of millions with a very serious grievance against the government.
If it sounds like I’m predicting social violence as a result of Swalwell’s plan, maybe even civil war, that doesn’t bother Swalwell: “It would be a short war, my friend. The government has nukes. Too many of them. But they’re legit. I’m sure if we talked we could find common ground to protect our families and communities.” The congressman threatens “nukes” — which I will charitably understand as a metonym for the power and authority of the federal government, not actual nuclear weapons — against resisters in the same tweet where he assumes there is common ground. But there isn’t: Swalwell’s casual invocation of nuclear war, while rhetorically extravagant, is at least consistent with the political future he imagines for his ideological opponents — they will be overwhelmed and destroyed.
Rep. Swalwell ends his essay: “Fixing our [assault weapon] problem requires boldness and will be costly, but the cost of letting it fester will be far higher — for our wallets, and for our souls.” That Swalwell can advocate this “fix” while cooly contemplating the disenfranchisement and imprisonment of millions of non-violent Americans says everything about the Progressive soul.
