Open Carry is Color Blind

With the protests (and riots) going on in Furguson, MO, there's been a lot of discussion going on about policing and race relations. One particular meme that the left has apparently taken up is that in the US there is "open carry for Whites but open season on Blacks". This relates in particular to another police shooting this year: 22-year-old John Crawford was shot in a Dayton-area Walmart after a 911 call was placed to police saying that a young man was waving around an "assault rifle" in the store. Police ordered him to put down the gun, which later proved to be a BB gun styled to look like a military weapon, and shot him when he did not comply as quickly as they desired.

Clearly, there wasn't an objective need to shoot someone with an unloaded air gun. At the same time, it's stupid (though not normally fatally stupid) to be capering about a store with a gun that looks real. I kind of have to wonder, too, how much effort this stupidity took. Having bought air rifles before, I can tell you that the Crosman MK-177 air pump rifle that Crawford was carrying when he was killed should have been in a cardboard box. They are not sold loose, though occasionally stores will have an un-packaged one on display in a case which customers can ask to see and handle. Perhaps such a case was left open and unattended, allowing Crawford to pick up the loose gun and move around with it (prompting the 911 call) but at a minimum this is a tragedy that didn't simply result from someone carrying a piece of merchandise to the checkout register.

Be that as it may, it's not actually similar to what open carry protesters do. Now, I want to be clear: I'm not supportive of open carry activism. There are decent reasons for it not to be illegal to carry a gun openly. But holding protests in which you rub people's noses in your ability to carry a weapon in public strikes me as socially disruptive and generally unhelpful to the gun rights movement.

That said, while I can see how to people who are deeply uncomfortable with guns and ignorant of gun culture, open carry might look like "running around with a gun", what the open carry activists do is actually pretty well planned and calibrated not to scare police. Open carry activists tend to keep hand guns holstered and long guns slung over their shoulders. If they hold long guns, they always keep the muzzle pointed up in the air or down at the ground. They don't point guns at people and they keep their fingers away from the trigger. This is the kind of behavior that is incredibly deeply ingrained within gun culture. There is no faster way to get yourself reamed out at a shooting range than to have bag muzzle control (point your gun at someone by accident) or have your finger on the trigger when the gun is not pointed downrange. Open carry activists know that they're being transgressive, and so they're being extra careful with their actions. The result is, they look fairly safe to police.

Nor is it necessarily only a white phenomenon. Gun culture is heavily white, but there are minority members of these groups, and there are also specifically minority gun rights groups. A case in point hit the news yesterday, with a group calling themselves the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, after the founder of the Black Panthers, held a protest in Dallas where they marched with long guns (including the much maligned AR-15) in protest over police shootings.

“We think that all black people have the right to self defense and self determination,” said Huey Freeman, an organizer. “We believe that we can police ourselves and bring security to our own communities.”

Police monitored the black-clad demonstrators, some of whom had rifles slung over their shoulders. As they walked down MLK Boulevard, many chanted “black power” and “justice for Michael Brown,” the black teenager shot by police in suburban St. Louis.

At one point, the group stopped at Elaine’s Kitchen, and one of the organizers told those who were armed to display their weapons in a “safe, disciplined manner.”

Freeman said they planned to patronize several South Dallas businesses to keep their money in the community and teach their neighbors about their “right to self-defense.”

The march came to a peaceful end about 90 minutes after it began at a car wash at Malcolm X Boulevard and Marburg Street. [Source]

Police did monitor the protest, but caused no trouble, and these men and woman sound like they handled their weapons responsibly and thus caused no alarm. There is, actually, a history of Black Power groups using open carry, and it's one that I can't help admiring a bit.

Gun Rights and Civil Rights

With gun control in the news, and the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday today, it's not a bad time to link to a fascinating article which The Atlantic ran a while back on the surprising origins of the modern gun rights movement and its interpretation of the 2nd Amendment:

THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

It was May 2, 1967, and the Black Panthers’ invasion of the California statehouse launched the modern gun-rights movement.
...
OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.

Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”

Guns became central to the Panthers’ identity, as they taught their early recruits that “the gun is the only thing that will free us—gain us our liberation.” They bought some of their first guns with earnings from selling copies of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to students at the University of California at Berkeley. In time, the Panther arsenal included machine guns; an assortment of rifles, handguns, explosives, and grenade launchers; and “boxes and boxes of ammunition,” recalled Elaine Brown, one of the party’s first female members, in her 1992 memoir. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. One Panther bragged that, if they wanted, they could have bought an M48 tank and driven it right up the freeway.

Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Their instructors were sympathetic black veterans, recently home from Vietnam. For their “righteous revolutionary struggle,” the Panthers were trained, as well as armed, however indirectly, by the U.S. government.

Civil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home. One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.

The Panthers, however, took it to an extreme, carrying their guns in public, displaying them for everyone—especially the police—to see. Newton had discovered, during classes at San Francisco Law School, that California law allowed people to carry guns in public so long as they were visible, and not pointed at anyone in a threatening way.

In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. When one officer asked to see one of the guns, Newton refused. “I don’t have to give you anything but my identification, name, and address,” he insisted. This, too, he had learned in law school.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?” an officer responded.

“Who in the hell do you think you are?,” Newton replied indignantly. He told the officer that he and his friends had a legal right to have their firearms.

Newton got out of the car, still holding his rifle.

“What are you going to do with that gun?” asked one of the stunned policemen.

“What are you going to do with your gun?,” Newton replied.

By this time, the scene had drawn a crowd of onlookers. An officer told the bystanders to move on, but Newton shouted at them to stay. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere. Newton played it up for the crowd. In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Because they hadn’t committed any crime, the Panthers were allowed to go on their way.

The people who’d witnessed the scene were dumbstruck. Not even Bobby Seale could believe it. Right then, he said, he knew that Newton was the “baddest motherfucker in the world.” Newton’s message was clear: “The gun is where it’s at and about and in.” After the February incident, the Panthers began a regular practice of policing the police. Thanks to an army of new recruits inspired to join up when they heard about Newton’s bravado, groups of armed Panthers would drive around following police cars. When the police stopped a black person, the Panthers would stand off to the side and shout out legal advice.

Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to the Capitol.” Seale was incredulous. “The Capitol?” Newton explained: “Mulford’s there, and they’re trying to pass a law against our guns, and we’re going to the Capitol steps.” Newton’s plan was to take a select group of Panthers “loaded down to the gills,” to send a message to California lawmakers about the group’s opposition to any new gun control.

Needless to say, this method of campaigning against gun control (especially given the source) did not go over well. The bill sailed through, as did several other 1960's sets of gun restrictions at the state and federal levels aimed to tamp down the growing waves of crime and civil unrest that were coming to characterize the 1960's.

And yet, those same trends towards unrest created a new sense of urgency on the right for the means to protect themselves.

After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald, who had bought his gun through a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, Franklin Orth, then the NRA’s executive vice president, testified in favor of banning mail-order rifle sales. “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” Orth and the NRA didn’t favor stricter proposals, like national gun registration, but when the final version of the Gun Control Act was adopted in 1968, Orth stood behind the legislation. While certain features of the law, he said, “appear unduly restrictive and unjustified in their application to law-abiding citizens, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.”

A GROWING GROUP OF rank-and-file NRA members disagreed. In an era of rising crime rates, fewer people were buying guns for hunting, and more were buying them for protection. The NRA leadership didn’t fully grasp the importance of this shift. In 1976, Maxwell Rich, the executive vice president, announced that the NRA would sell its building in Washington, D.C., and relocate the headquarters to Colorado Springs, retreating from political lobbying and expanding its outdoor and environmental activities.

Rich’s plan sparked outrage among the new breed of staunch, hard-line gun-rights advocates. The dissidents were led by a bald, blue-eyed bulldog of a man named Harlon Carter, who ran the NRA’s recently formed lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. In May 1977, Carter and his allies staged a coup at the annual membership meeting. Elected the new executive vice president, Carter would transform the NRA into a lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens.

The new NRA was not only responding to the wave of gun-control laws enacted to disarm black radicals; it also shared some of the Panthers’ views about firearms. Both groups valued guns primarily as a means of self-defense. Both thought people had a right to carry guns in public places, where a person was easily victimized, and not just in the privacy of the home.

The article is lengthy, but makes for fascinating reading.

Assault Weapons Part 3: Gun Control

In Part 2 I described the essentially cosmetic characteristics which were used to define some civilian rifles based on military assault rifle designs as "assault weapons" in the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB). During the ban period (1994 to 2004) and even more so since, military style rifles have become dramatically more popular in the civilian market.  The AR-15 (the family of civilian rifles based on the military M16) is now the most popular type of civilian rifle in the US with dozens of models on the market. However, these rifles continue to have a very bad reputation with gun control advocates and they have been used in several recent highly publicized crimes such as the Aurora, CO movie theater shooting and the Newton, CT school shooting. This has led to renewed calls for increased regulation or outright bans of "assault weapons". In this third and final post on the "assault weapon" issue, I'd like to address the following issues: How often are military style rifles used in crimes? Are they particularly suited to crime? Did the 1994 AWB have any discernible effect on crime? Do military style rifles have legitimate civilian purposes?

How Much Are "Assault Weapons" Used In Crime?
The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence takes a fairly standard line on "assault weapons" in its page on the topic:

Assault weapons possess features specifically designed by the world's militaries to make it easier for the shooter to fire a sustained, high volume of rounds into a wide area. As a result of America's weak gun laws, these weapons entered our civilian marketplace decades ago, and criminals quickly learned how to exploit their military features.

However, these claims about the widespread adoption of military style rifles by criminals do not seem to align well with the facts. According to a report this year by the Congressional Research Office "By 2007, the number of firearms [owned by US civilians] had increased to approximately 294 million: 106 million handguns, 105 million rifles, and 83 million shotguns." (page 8) However, according to the FBI's uniform crime report, only 3.6% of murders are committed using rifles, a number that would include both "assault weapons" and more traditional rifles. Rifles were outranked in numbers of murders committed in 2010 by handguns (60.2% of murders), knives (13.1%), fists, kicking and other uses of the human body (5.7%), blunt objects (4.2%) and shotguns (3.7%). Another way to think of this is: Although there are roughly the same number of rifles and handguns available in the US, handguns are used in homicides at a rate nearly 17 times that of rifles.

A 2004 report prepared for the National Institute of Justice to assess the effectiveness of the (then expiring) Federal Assault Weapon Ban wrote:

Numerous studies have examined the use of AWs in crime prior to the federal ban. The definition of AWs varied across the studies and did not always correspond exactly to that of the 1994 law (in part because a number of the studies were done prior to 1994). In general, however, the studies appeared to focus on various semiautomatics with detachable magazines and military-style features. According to these accounts, AWs typically accounted for up to 8% of guns used in crime, depending on the specific AW definition and data source used (e.g., see Beck et al., 1993; Hargarten et al., 1996; Hutson et al., 1994; 1995; McGonigal et al., 1993; New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, 1994; Roth and Koper, 1997, Chapters 2, 5, 6; Zawitz, 1995). A compilation of 38 sources indicated that AWs accounted for 2% of crime guns on average (Kleck, 1997, pp.112, 141-143).

Similarly, the most common AWs prohibited by the 1994 federal ban accounted for between 1% and 6% of guns used in crime according to most of several national and local data sources examined for this and our prior study (see Chapter 6 and Roth and
Koper, 1997, Chapters 5, 6)
...
Although each of the sources cited above has limitations, the estimates consistently show that AWs are used in a small fraction of gun crimes. Even the highest estimates, which correspond to particularly rare events such mass murders and police murders, are no higher than 13%. Note also that the majority of AWs used in crime are assault pistols (APs) rather than assault rifles (ARs). Among AWs reported by police to ATF during 1992 and 1993, for example, APs outnumbered ARs by a ratio of 3 to 1 (see Chapter 6).

From all of these, it would seem that military style rifles simply are not used that much in crime. This should not actually be all that surprising. The reason why the modern assault rifle is such an effective military weapon is that it is able to deliver accurate fire (and do so rapidly enough to allow a single soldier to tie down multiple enemy soldiers) at a distance of up to several hundred yards. This function (delivering accurate fire out to several hundred yards) is useful to civilian sport shooters as well, but it is of no use to criminals, who generally are using guns at a distance of just a few feet. That is why handguns are favored by criminals. Long distance accuracy and even rate of fire are not nearly as important in crime.  Indeed, in most crimes employing a gun, the gun is not even fired; it is used as a threat.  Far more important to criminals is the ability to carry a gun without it being seen until it is produced. Rifles, however military in appearance, do not fit well in a pocket.

Compactness is also the reason why handguns are primarily used by civilians in self defense. According to the same Congressional Research Office report cited above (page 13):

Another source of information on the use of firearms for self-defense is the National Self-Defense Survey conducted by criminology professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University in the spring of 1993. Citing responses from 4,978 households, Dr. Kleck estimated that handguns had been used 2.1 million times per year for self-defense, and that all types of guns had been used approximately 2.5 million times a year for that purpose during the 1988-1993 period.

This would suggest that while handguns are used in 89% of murders that are committed with guns, they are also used in 84% of cases of self defense. (As with the use of guns in crime, in the majority of cases of self defense, the gun is never fired, it is only drawn as a threat.)

Military rifles do seem to hold an attraction to some people bent on mass kills, as shown by the use of AR-15 rifles by the killers at Aurora, CO and Newton, CT. However, these cases are incredibly rare, only a handful over the last decade, as compared to the millions of military style rifles owned and used by completely law abiding citizens. Nor are military style rifles in any way required to perpetrate horrific mass killings as examples such as the Virginia Tech shooting demonstrate. Although gun control advocates tend to emphasize that "assault weapons" are designed to be fired "as fast as possible", the fact of the matter is that the civilian rifles which are termed "assault rifles" do not fire any faster than more traditional designs of semi-automatic rifles, or than pistols and revolvers. Virtually all handguns manufactured in the last 100 years, and a significant percentage of the rifles manufactured in the last 50, can be fired as fast as the trigger can be pulled. The attraction of military style rifles for mass killers is not that they offer some technological edge in killing that other guns do not possess, it is that their appearance ties in with their deluded images of themselves, allowing them to think of themselves as looking more deadly. In this sense, the selection of a gun with a military appearance is much the same as the selection of "tactical gear" which often serves little practical function for the crime planned, but which allows the killer to imagine himself to be military and dangerous in appearance.

Did the 1994 AWB Reduce Crime?
Murder rates and violent crimes rate did fall significantly from roughly 1994 (the year when the AWB was enacted) through 2000 and have remained flat to slightly down since that time. However, rifles (and thus necessarily the subset of military-style rifles) remained a roughly stable (and very small) percentage of guns used in crimes throughout the period. The National Institute of Justice Report showed some evidence that military style rifles were used less in crimes after the 1994 ban (pages 42-45) however it also noted that since rifle manufacturers came out with legal ban-compliant versions of their military style rifles, the actual number of military style rifles sold went up during the ban rather than down (page 35-36). Given this increase in sales of military-style rifle and the fact that the "ban" did not actually remove any of the existing "assault weapons" from circulation, it seems likely that any small change in the rate of their use in crimes would have been coincidental.

Altogether, the NIJ conclusion that the ban had little clear effect on crimes seems pretty likely:

Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement. AWs were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. LCMs [large capacity magazines, defined by the AWB as magazines holding more than ten rounds] are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading.

Now that eight years have passed since the expiration of the, with sales of "assault weapons" skyrocketing but the number of murders falling, it seems hard to make a case that the expiration of the AWB has had any effect on crime either.

Do military style rifles have legitimate civilian purposes?
The somewhat peculiar rhetorical fall-back which is sometimes executed in the face of this data goes something like this: "Sure, assault weapons may only be used in a small percentage of crimes, but these are guns which have no legitimate civilian purpose, so why not ban them and achieve whatever small reduction in violence that would result?"

This seems like an odd argument in the face of the fact that military style semiautomatic rifles are one of the highest selling types of rifles in the US. With millions of these rifles being owned by US citizens and only a few hundred being used for crimes each year, it seems fairly obvious that there must be legitimate civilian purposes for them. Millions of civilians are choosing to spend $700-$2000 in order to buy these rifles, and very few of them are using the rifles to commit crimes, so whatever they are doing with them would seem to be "legitimate civilian purposes". As I described in more detail in Part 2, these rifles are actually pretty well suited both to target shooting and to home defense.

Are military style rifles exceptionally "high power" rifles?
One of the other claims that I often see in news stories is that military style rifles such as AR-15s are far more "high powered" rifles than normal civilian rifles. Coalition to Stop Gun Violence collects a number of quotes from such stories on their "What Law Enforcement Says About Assault Weapons" page:

"We're literally outgunned. You're talking about the kind of firepower that can go through vehicles, through vests, and that can literally go through a house."
...
"These are state-of-the-art weapons ... My firearms experts over here tell me that...no body armor that we have would have saved our officers from these weapons here. I mean, in fact, many of them are capable of slicing through a vehicle. This is just how deadly these weapons are."
...
“[A semiautomatic AK-47 rifle] can lay down a lot of fire in an urban area where there is basically no cover from it. You can conceal yourself from these weapons, but they’ll rip through a car. They’ll rip through a telephone pole. They can rip through just about anything in an urban environment. Everybody understands when they read the morning paper that you have to push as much as you can to get these guns off the street."

It is true that rifle bullets are very powerful and destructive things, often capable of going through walls or piercing the metal body of a car. However, this is the case with all rifle bullets. Indeed, the intermediate size rounds fired by assault rifles are significantly lower power than the rounds typically used by hunters. The 5.56×45mm NATO round fired by the AR-15 packs a force of 1,300 foot-pounds of energy. The 7.62×39mm fired by the AK-47 is slightly more powerful at 1,500 foot-pounds. However, the .308 Winchester, a common hunting cartridge, is far more powerful than either one at 2,600 foot-pounds.  Every common hunting cartridge is more powerful than those used by military assault rifles.  The suggestion that "assault weapons" fire unusually high powered rounds compared to standard rifles is directly contrary to the very purpose of the shift from battle rifles to assault rifles after World War II, which was to move to a lower power (and thus lower recoil) cartridge that would be easier for soldiers to shoot.

What perhaps gives rise to this confusion is that "assault weapon" rounds pack far more force than standard pistol rounds. For instance, the 9mm Luger round (which the ATF reports is the most common caliber of pistols traced by police in connection with crimes -- and which is also the caliber of pistol most often carried by police themselves) carries a force of only 400 foot-pounds, a little less than a third of that of the AR-15's 5.56×45mm NATO.

Is there a legitimate purpose to "high capacity magazines"?
Magazine size is perhaps the number one area in which new gun control legislation is likely to focus. The 1994 AWB banned the manufacture and importation of magazines holding more than ten rounds for any type of gun with a removable magazine. This had the largest effect on semiautomatic pistols. Most pistols made in the last 20 years hold over a dozen rounds in their standard magazine.  (This isn't because the guns are particularly "high capacity", it's just the number that fit in a magazine the same length as the pistol's grip.)  Military style rifles also often came with a larger magazine holding 20-30 rounds.

Gun control proponents point out that there are very few situations in which a civilian would need to have a magazine holding more than ten rounds of ammunition. Hunters usually only get one good shot at an animal. Target shooting is usually done in sets of 5 or 10 shots. Very few self defense situations require firing more than ten shots.

However, at the same time, very few crimes involve the firing of large numbers of shots either. The National Institute of Justice study on the AWB reported that only 3% of instances of gun violence involved the firing of more than ten shots -- though those 3% did account for 5% of gunshot injuries, a slightly disproportionate share.

Gun rights advocates respond with two fairly indisputable points: To the person intent on firing a lot of shots in the commission of a crime, carrying extra loaded magazines is easy and changing magazines is incredibly fast.  With no particular training it takes about a second to drop an empty magazine and put in a new one.  Further, given that there are already, by government estimates, 20-30 million magazines holding more than ten rounds in current circulation, even if the manufacture of more were banned, there are so many already available that the ban would do little other than increase the cost.  An sort of buy-back or confiscation program would be very difficult to enforce simply because of the huge number of magazines in circulation.  As such, it seems very hard to imagine than any ban of the manufacture of new magazines holding more than ten rounds would do anything other than annoy gun owners -- something which at times seems to be considered an end unto itself among gun control advocates.

Summing up: In the face of terrible crimes, there is a strong desire on the part of civil society to "do something". In the coming weeks and months we will see that instinct playing itself out in full force. An attempt to ban or regulate "assault weapons" is likely to be one of the centerpieces of this attempt to do something. However, for all their black and angular aesthetic, "assault weapons" are not different in function than other common rifles. They substitute metal stocks and grips for wood, and they sometimes feature military style features that have little relevance to civilian use (lugs to which a bayonet can be attached, flash suppressors, etc.) but these features do not make them more dangerous. Indeed, the lighter weight cartridges which they share with the military assault rifles which are their technological ancestors are actually significantly less powerful than the standard hunting cartridges fired by most "normal" civilian rifles. The rifles labeled as "assault weapons" are owned by millions of law abiding citizens, and they are very rarely used in crimes. The urge to ban or regulate them is an urge to put appearances over substance.

I don't own an "assault weapon", indeed I've never shot one.

But I would like to own one of these someday if they're still legal:

The M1A, civilian version of the M14, the last US battle rifle.  While

I've come to appreciate the AR-15 a lot more while researching these

posts, I"m a wooden stock and .30 cartridge kind of guy.

Previous posts:
Assault Weapons Part 1: Battle Rifle to Assault Rifle

Assault Weapons Part 2: Assault Rifles vs. "Assault Weapons"

Assault Weapons Part 2: Assault Rifles vs. "Assault Weapons"

In Part 1 I discussed the history of military service rifles and the development of the "assault rifle" during and after World War II. To briefly review (especially for those who got tired of all the technical detail and skipped most of it): A military assault rifle is a rifle with a selective fire feature (the ability to shoot in semi-automatic, burst or fully automatic mode) which fires a smaller, lower power rifle cartridge suitable for battlefield confrontations out to 300 yards. Assault rifles are so named in contrast to full size "battle rifles" which fired a larger, higher powered rifle cartridge similar to those used by most modern hunters, and also in contrast to submachine guns, hand-held fully automatic weapons (usually with some kind of stock) that fired a pistol cartridge rather than a rifle cartridge. These were accurate only at very short ranges. The assault rifle, with its compact size, selective fire and small rifle cartridge combined the best features of the battle rifle and the submachine gun and thus made a far more versatile all around military weapon.

In this post, I'm going to discuss the civilian rifles based on military assault rifles. I'll discuss how these civilian rifles are similar to their military cousins and how they differ, why they have become so popular with shooters (the AR-15, the civilian rifle based on the M16 design, is reported to be the highest selling rifle design in the country with models being produced by over a dozen gun manufacturers), and finally I'll discuss the legal definition of "assault weapons" as found in the 1994 federal assault weapon ban (now expired). I'll specifically tackle the merits of additional legal restrictions on civilian "assault weapons" in a third post.

Military to Civilian

As I described in my previous post, the military purpose of the assault rifle had two basic components: selective fire and a smaller rifle cartridge which was accurate out to 300 yards yet was easier to shoot in burst or full auto mode than a full size high power rifle cartridge. Military and civilian gun technology have always advanced hand in hand. Lever action, cartridge repeating rifles and revolvers were introduced for military use during the Civil War and proceeded to become wildly popular on the civilian market during the following 50 years. After World War One, bolt action rifles (mainly based on military designs) became the standard civilian rifles and semi-automatic pistols (many of them based on the military versions like the Colt .45 and the German 9mm Luger) became increasingly popular. After World War II, rifles from the war or based on designs used during the war (including millions of M1 Garands and M1903 Springfields sold off as military surplus for civilian use as well as German K98 Mausers which were confiscated from conquered Germany and sold on the civilian market) became popular for civilian use. However, assault rifles were, by definition, excluded from the US civilian market because the 1934 Firearms Act had banned civilian ownership of machine guns in the US. Thus, any rifle with selective fire was automatically illegal for civilian US ownership. As early assault rifles began to make their way onto the US market (either as military surplus or with civilian models of military weapons) any assault rifle intended for the US market had to be modified in order to permanently remove any burst fire or automatic fire features. This means that any gun sold legally to civilians in the US (with a few rare exceptions for collectors with very special licenses issued by the federal government) does not fit the military definition of an assault rifle, since it lacks a selective fire feature. It is simply a "military-style" rifle which shoots a lower power rifle cartridge the same as the cartridges used by real military assault rifles.

When Colt got the contract to build the M16 for the US military, it also released a civilian model, the AR-15. (AR stands for Armalite Rifle, Armalite having been the manufacturer which originally developed the design and sold it to Colt.) The AR-15 was different from its military cousin the M16 in that it did not have a selective fire feature, and several internal components of the rifle were modified in order to make it harder for enterprising owners to modify the gun in order to make it into a fully automatic machine gun. A few other manufacturers offered civilian rifles based on the M16 design (and all civilian rifles based on this design are loosely referred to by shooters as "AR" rifles, even though "AR-15" is a trademark of Colt) but these guns were not widely popular. Other civilian rifles based on modern military rifle designs (or surplus military rifles from other countries which had been modified to disable selective fire features) were also available for sale in the US, but again, sales of them were not particularly high.

Arguably, the main reason for this is that civilian rifles based on military designs fired cartridges which most hunters considered to be too light for hunting. Indeed, the .223 Remington cartridge which is fired by the AR-15 is not allowed for hunting deer and other full size game in some states, because it is believed that it is too small and low powered to kill humanely. The primary hunting use of the .223 (for which it was popular prior to its adoption by the military as the 5.56x45 NATO) was "varmint hunting" at long ranges. Ranchers used these high velocity, highly accurate but small cartridges to shoot pests like prairie dogs, coyotes and the like at long distances.

There were, of course, exceptions to this. The Civilian Marksmanship Program (originally set up in 1903 as a government program but spun off as a semi-private organization in 1996) holds national target shooting matches in which the US service rifles (the M1 Garand, and the civilian versions of the M14 and M16) are the only allowed rifles.  The original purpose of the CMP was to improve the marksmanship of the general population in preparation for wartime service, thus the emphasis on military rifles.  And, of course, some shooters simply enjoyed using the civilian version of the US service rifle for sport shooting.

How "Assault Weapons" Became Popular

Civilian versions of military assault rifles were available on the US market ever since the development of assault rifles, however, it wasn't until several factors came into alignment in the early 1990s that they began to become highly popular.

As the Cold War wound to a close and the iron curtain came down, the governments of Eastern Europe found themselves pressed for cash and sitting on huge arsenals of aging military rifles, not just assault rifles but even millions of bolt action Mausers and Mosin-Nagants dating back to World War II and before. They began to sell these rifles on the international market. Western-made civilian versions of military rifles (such as the Colt SP-1, the AR-15 sold during the 70s and 80s) had been fairly expensive. These communist block guns, however, were far cheaper, and there was also dirt cheap surplus ammunition being sold for them.

At the same time, AR-15 type rifles benefited from the popularity of the Gulf War. In the 70s and 80s the M16 had been closely associated with Vietnam, and many gun owners derided it as under powered, unreliable, over priced, made of plastic, etc. The M16 (and its civilian cousins) had been gradually improved in the 25 years since its adoption by the military and so Gulf War era M16s were genuinely higher quality than their Vietnam era ancestors. At the same time, the M16 had arguably been unfairly derided in the wake of an unpopular war and the low military morale that followed it. After the Gulf War, respect for the military was far higher and respect for its standard rifle rose as well.

Sport shooting culture was changing during this period as well. Rather than being solely devoted to hunting, an increasing number of shooters were interested primarily in sport shooting at gun ranges and being prepared for potential self defense use of guns. For those who shot almost exclusively at gun ranges, the fact that the cartridges fired by civilian versions of military assault rifles were fairly light for hunting game didn't matter, and the fact that cheap military surplus ammunition was available made civilian versions of military rifles much cheaper to shoot than standard hunting rifles. Further, for gun owners concerned about self defense, military style rifles offered intimidating looks more likely to cause an assailant to flee while also being compact and light. The lower power cartridges fired by military style rifles also made them more suitable for home defense than a full size hunting rifle.

Arguably the biggest boost to the popularity of military style rifles, however, were the attempts to ban them. Little regulatory attention had been paid to military style rifles until the Stockton Shooting in 1989, in which an alcoholic drifter and frequent criminal named Patrick Purdy bought an AK-47, decorated it and his tactical jacket with legends such as "Freedom", "Victory", "Hezbollah", "PLO", and "death to the Great Satin"[sic] and opened fire on elementary school children at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, CA, which he had himself attended sixteen years before. Five children were killed and twenty-nine wounded before Purdy took his own life. California passed a ban on military style rifles which it termed "assault weapons" later that year, and President George H. W. Bush signed an executive order restricting the importation of military style rifles from outside the country. These efforts culminated in the passing of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994, which banned the import or manufacture of rifles which certain military style features.

Gun rights organizations pointed out (rightly) that the features banned by the AWB were in the main cosmetic. The controversy focused huge amounts of attention on military style rifles. Shooters who had never thought about trying a military style rifle before tried them, and often found they enjoyed them. And anyone who had vaguely thought of buying one at some point snapped one up before the ban was put in effect. As the passage of the ban (which only banned the manufacture and importation of new guns with certain features but did not seek to restrict those which were already made prior to the ban) loomed, sales of the rifles it would ban skyrocketed. Once the ban did pass, many of the less expensive foreign competitors to the American-made AR-15 models became much harder to get while makers of AR-15s quickly modified their designs to be compliant with the ban and continued selling rifles. Thus, due to publicity and the proudly contrarian tendencies of shooters, sales of military style rifles actually went up rather than down after the Assault Weapon Ban. When the ban expired in 2004, sales expanded even more rapidly as the "evil" features became legal again on new rifles. The AR-15 platform is now the best selling type of rifle in the US with so many models available on the market that Field & Stream ran an article back in 2009 listing the "25 Best AR-Style Rifles".

The Legal Definition of "Assault Weapons"

When legislators sought to ban military style rifles, they faced a problem: Since military assault rifle designs already had to be modified in order to remove selective fire features in order to be sold in the US civilian market, there was not actually a functional different between the military style rifles which gun control advocates sought to ban and "normal" sporting rifles. The result was a checklist of what gun rights advocates jestingly referred to as "evil" features.  Any rifle that had two or more of these features was legally defined as an "assault weapon".

However, since these were minor cosmetic features (with the exception of the pistol grip which does have superior ergonomics to the more traditional stock comb grip) the solution was simply to remove the other offending features. Thus, while the above AR-15 could not have been manufactured under the AWB, the one below would not:

As the re-design of the rifles during the ban made clear, the features banned were in no way essential to the operation of the rifle. A flash suppressor may be useful for Navy SEALS conducting a night attack, but it makes no difference one way or another on the gun range or in committing a crime. A folding stock may make a carbine slightly more compact, but it certainly doesn't make it small enough to stuff down one's pants when going to hold up a liquor store. And the last time there was a deadly bayonet attack on US soil was probably during the Civil War. The only element of the law (one which applied to all guns, not just to "assault weapons") which might arguably make a gun "less deadly" was the ban on detachable magazines holding more than ten rounds of ammunition. Though as crimes such as Columbine show, it's still quite possible to have a deadly mass shooting in which high capacity magazines play no part. Regardless of what one may think about the need to ban or regulate military style rifles, the 1994 ban clearly achieved virtually nothing.

In the final post in this series, I'll look in more depth at the arguments for gun control laws banning or limiting "assault weapons".

Assault Weapons Part 1: Battle Rifle to Assault Rifle

This is part one of a series on "assault weapons", a topic likely to be in the news a great deal as the new congress tackles the possibility of new gun control measures. The term "assault weapon" is itself a frequently disputed one, having come in to currency with the "assault weapons" ban of 1994 (which expired to little fanfare in 2004.) It is based on the term "assault rifle" though the weapons legally defined as "assault weapons" by the ban were not technically assault rifles. Thus I am going to start out by examining the development of the "assault rifle" as a piece of military technology.

Looking back to the early days of our country, muzzle loading black powder muskets and rifles hurled large pieces of lead at comparatively low velocities (under 1000 feet per second). Muskets in the Revolutionary War shot .75 caliber musket balls. Caliber refers to the diameter of the bullet and it's normally a fractional number of inches. Thus, the musket balls of the Revolutionary War were three quarters of an inch in diameter. By the Civil War, musket balls were replaced by bullet-shaped .58 caliber "minie-balls". Although they were smaller in diameter, they were longer, so the actual mass was similar: 500-600 grains which translates to 1.1 to 1.4 ounces. (If you want a way to think about this, a quarter weights .2 ounces or 87 grains, so a Revolutionary or Civil War bullet weighed about as much as a stack of six quarters.)

Trapdoor Springfield

After the Civil War, the army adopted cartridge-based rifles. First the black powder .45 caliber "trapdoor" Springfield, a single shot cartridge rifle whose breech flipped open to load. Then, in 1892, the five shot .30 caliber Krag-Jørgensen bolt action rifle, which was the first US military rifle to use smokeless powder, shooting the .30-40 Government cartridge.

M1903 Springfield Bolt Action

Although each of these developments in military technology featured a lighter bullet with a smaller diameter, each also fired the bullet at higher velocity. Energy is calculated as mass times velocity squared times a constant of 1/2. By this calculation, the .30-06 bullets which World War I and II US Soldiers used packed more than twice as much energy as a Civil War era minie-ball, despite weighting only 150 grains (a bit less than the weight of two quarters.)

Improvements in weapons technology had consistently made rifles both faster to shoot and accurate to longer distances. Muzzle loading muskets and later rifles, from the time of the Revolutionary War to the Civil War could be fired at a rate of three shots per minute by trained soldiers, but while the smoothbore muskets of the Revolution were accurate, at best, to a hundred yards, the Civil War era rifles could be accurate out to 300 yards or more. This drastic increase in the accurate range of small arms was one of the factors that significantly changed battle tactics from those of the Napoleonic era. Several decades before, a mass infantry charge such as Picket's famous charge at Gettysburg could have been a decisive means of victory. With the longer range rifled muskets of the Civil War, it led to mass slaughter.

While muzzle loading technology had imposed a fairly strict limit on the rate of fire that infantry soldiers could deliver, the introduction of cartridge rifles allowed significant increases . While a Civil War era rifled musket could only be fired three time a minute even by soldiers well trained in speed drill, the single shot, cartridge loading "trapdoor" Springfield could get off ten shots a minute. The bolt action, five shot M1903 Springfields used during World War One allowed a soldier to get off fifteen aimed shots a minute.

Technological improvements had continued to increase the accuracy of battle rifles as well. By the first world war, the rifles carried by all of the major combatants were no longer limited by the technical specifications of the rifle but by the ability of their users. All of the battle rifles used in the Great War fired bullets of roughly .30 caliber from high powered cartridges and could hit a man-sized target at distances of 800-1000 yards. The issue was: Although the rifles were technically capable of hitting a target at such extreme distances, none but the most skilled snipers had either the eyesight or the steadiness to hit targets at that distance. Indeed, the majority of battlefield fire was exchanged at distances of less than 300 yards.

In the 1920s, the US military began to search for a new standard service rifle, which was to be the first semi-automatic service rifle. A number of designs were tested, and the one eventually selected was the M1 Garand, named after its designer John Garand. Throughout much of its development, the military planned to have the M1 chambered for a lighter cartridge in .276 caliber, however at a late date it had the rifle re-engineered to shoot the same .30-06 as the M1903 Springfield because so much .30-06 ammunition was already on hand. The M1 was adopted as the standard US infantry rifle in 1936, and the US was thus the only major power in World War II whose primary battle rifle was not a bolt action. However, the M1 shot the same kind of high powered .30 caliber cartridge which all of the other battle rifles of the war shot.

US Service Rifles: Two M1903 Sprinfields, an M1 Garant, an M1 Carbine,
an M14 and an M16 (Click to See Larger)

It was in World War II that the need for a lighter gun suitable for rapid fire became increasingly obvious. For most of the war this was achieved through specialization. Most infantry soldiers carried full size battle rifles and a smaller number were issued sub machine guns -- lighter weapons which could shoot in fully automatic (firing continuously as long as the trigger was held down) or burst mode (firing bursts of 3-5 shots every time the trigger was pulled.)  To make then easy to handle (and allow them to carry more rounds) sub machine guns shot smaller, pistol cartridges rather than a full size rifle cartridge and was thus suitable only for short range.

Tom Hanks holding a Thompson
Sub Machine Gun in Saving Private Ryan

Military technologists were convinced that a cross between a full sized battle rifle and a sub machine gun was needed. Such a gun would shoot a rifle cartridge, but a lighter one which would not have as much recoil as a high power .30 round. It should also be capable of shooting in burst or fully automatic mode as well as semi-automatic mode (one shot for each pull of the trigger.)

Germany produced what is often regarded as the first true "assault rifle" near the end of World War II, the Sturmgewehr 44. It shot a shortened .30 caliber bullet with a lighter charge of powder behind it, making the recoil lighter and the ammunition cheaper to produce and lighter to carry, and it could shoot either in semi-auto or full-auto mode. By late 1943, however, the tide was already turning against Germany and its manufacturing capacity was waning. Only half a million were ever produced (compared to over 14 million of their full size K98 Mauser bolt action battle rifle.) However, it provided the inspiration for Mikhail Kalashnikov's development of the AK-47 in Russia after the war. The AK-47 also used a light .30 caliber cartridge and selective fire (the ability to fire either semi-auto or full-auto.) The design became the standard Russian infantry rifle in 1949 and went on to become perhaps the most widely produced rifle design in history.

Sturmgewehr 44

AK-47

The 5.56x45mm round shot by the M16 (left)
next to the 7.62x51mm shot by the M14.

The United States was comparatively late to the game in adopting an assault rifle for its armed forces. After World War II the US sought to improve on the M1 Garand and in 1959 adopted the M14. The M14 did have selective fire and accepted a large detachable magazine.  (The Garand had a unique loading mechanism: it's magazine was fixed but clips of eight shots were loaded in from the top.  Those eight shots could then be fired as fast as the shooter could pull the trigger.  After the last shot, the rifle ejected the metal clip out the top and the bolt locked open.  The shooter then loaded a new clip in from the top and released the bolt to load the next cartridge.)

However, the M14 still fired a full size .30 cartridge, the 7.62×51mm NATO which fired a bullet of the same size as the .30-06 at the same speed. The rifle had many fans and continues to be used to this day by US soldiers and marines who are designated marksmen, but the 7.62×51mm NATO proved too high powered a cartridge to be practically shot in burst or full auto mode, and the rifle itself was heavy. As a result, the US Army adopted the M16 for jungle combat in 1963 and in 1969 made the M16 the standard service rifle. The M16, made with an aluminum receiver and a plastic stock, was five inches shorter and three pounds lighter than the M14 and it shot a much smaller cartridge, the 5.56×45mm NATO, with a .22 caliber bullet weighting about a third as much as the .30 caliber bullet of the 7.62×51mm NATO.

Because the bullet is so light and travels at such high velocity, it is extremely accurate even at long distances. However, due to its light weight it packs only half as much energy as full size .30 caliber rounds. This makes the M16 much more comfortable to fire, especially rapidly, which is the purpose of the "assault rifle" concept, however troops have in some conditions complained that it lacks "stopping power" and in Iraq and Afghanistan many units have a designated marksman with an M14 for situations in which a heavier weapon is needed. For the same reason, many hunters shun the civilian version of the round (the .223 Remington), believing that it is too small to humanely kill deer and other full size game. The round is often found, however, in the "modern sporting rifles" which are similar appearance to military designs. For the recreational shooter, the light rounds fired by military assault rifles are often preferred because they have fairly light recoil, are highly accurate at the 100-200 yard distances found at most rifle ranges, and because ammunition is far less expensive than the larger high powered hunting rounds.

Military technology has continued to develop, but all standard service rifles since the 1960's have been variations on the assault rifle concept.  The standard US service rifle is the M4 Carbine, a slightly modernized version of the M16 design.

M4 Carbine

More recent assault rifles adopted by other nations all have the basic features of selective fire and smaller rifle cartridges. More modern innovations generally relate either to compactness (a number place the action in the stock, behind the trigger, allowing for a shorter overall length of the rifle even while keeping the same length barrel) or modularity.

French FAMAS

German G36

British SA-80

Next in Part 2: Civilian weapons based on assault rifle designs, how they differ from their military cousins, and what the Federal Assault Weapons Ban actually outlawed.

Who Is The Hobbesian?

In the wake of the Newtown school shooting, anti-gun advocates came out quickly and loudly arguing that new gun control measures were necessary. Gun rights organizations such as the NRA wisely kept their mouths shut for a while, having learned (correctly) that no one wants to hear from them in the wake of a mass shooting, but given the plentiful and often strident anti-gun rhetorical coursing through the media and social media, pro-gun advocates started answering back and provided their own solution: If some trained and armed person had been present, the attack could have been stopped.

This seems to be one of the basic divisions of thinking that inevitably comes up in the gun control debate. Gun control advocates argue that killing could be avoided if the availability of guns were reduced. Gun advocates argue that violence can be reduced by making sure that there is someone nearby to respond to violence (and that the knowledge that there are likely armed citizens or off duty law enforcement around will deter crimes.)

Occasionally this "more guns" argument even comes from somewhat surprising quarters. Left-leaning writer Jeffrey Goldberg writing at The Atlantic this month argued that since the US has so many guns in circulation (and a sufficient cultural attachment to them) that it would never be possible to make the US gun free, it would be better to make sure that there are significantly more well trained citizens with concealed carry licenses.

Alan Jacobs over at The American Conservative states a common objection to the "more guns could prevent violence" point of view:

But what troubles me most about this suggestion — and the general More Guns approach to social ills — is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man” in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now — but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly.

Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.)

It seems to me that in many ways this reaction underlines a divide in how people think about society and order -- one that generally falls along the left/right axis, though since Jacobs is writing for TAC I would assume that in some sense he calls himself a "conservative".

Jacobs says that the "more guns" approach to dealing with crime implies a “war of every man against every man”. In keeping with this view, he instead advocates reducing the availability of guns in order to make sure that however much every man way want to make war against every other man, he can't do so as lethally.

However, it seems to me that the "more guns" solution does not in fact assume a Hobbesian reality, it assumes that the vast majority of people do support and wish to enforce an orderly society, and thus that members of that society can and should be allowed to have the power to protect society against those who seek to disrupt with it violence.

Jacobs believes that guns should be restricted precisely because he believes in a Hobbesian war of all against all. The "more guns" suggestion, on the other hand, seems to imply a basic social solidarity -- that most people are and desire to be law abiding. The more Hobbesian view holds that the tools of force should, as much as possible, be restricted only to those who represent state authority -- an authority which externally imposes order on a society which would otherwise be violently anarchic. The "more guns" partisans believe that an orderly society is fairly natural, and that members of it simply need to be given the tools to enforce that order against a small minority who would disrupt that order.

Or course, if the disagreement on guns boils down, among other things, to a fundamental disagreement about human nature, it's obvious that agreement and resolution would be very difficult.

ADDENDUM: Since the recent surge in discussion of gun control has touched off by the mass murder at Newtown, it's probably worth stating as a side note that although in general I'm sympathetic to allowing more citizens to get concealed carry permits (given some appropriate level of background check and proficiency) it seems to me that those suggesting that this is the clear solution to schools shootings are probably over-reaching. Schools shootings are incredibly rare (statistically, an average US school will be hit with a mass shooting every 12,000 years) and I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to form a lot of school policies around such an unusual event. Plus, I suspect that not many school teachers are the sort who want to carry weapons.

Is The Public Crazy Not To Support Gun Control?

A number of opinion writers have taken the occasion of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado to express disgust with the fact that the American public shows little inclination towards increased gun control. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who say they "feel that laws covering the sale of firearms should be made more strict" dropped from 78% to 44% during the period from 1990 to 2010.

Some of the more hyperbolic has claimed this is because the US is seized by a "death cult" or that it "worships violence", but I think the actual reason is quite rational.

If we look at the percentage of people supporting stricter gun control in relation to the percentage of people who say they own guns (also from Gallup) and the US homicide rate, we see that the homicide rate dropped by 49% from 1990 to 2010 while gun ownership rates have remained fairly flat.

Since people readily perceive that gun ownership remains common, and yet violent crime has fallen significantly since the height of the '80s and '90s crime wave, people seem to implicitly believe that restricting gun ownership is not necessary in order to deal with crime.

We can get a somewhat longer term view of this if we look at an older Gallup question which is available in the same study, the percentage of Americans who say they support a ban on civilian handgun ownership. The question has been asked somewhat sporadically by Gallup, so we have only a few data points from the 50s, 60s and 70s, but the pattern is still very interesting.

Gallup first asked the question in 1959 when the murder rate had just gone up from 4.1 in 1955 to 4.9 in 1959. Support for a ban was quite high as 60%. Support for a ban dropped rapidly while crime increased. In 1979 31% of Americans supported banning handguns and the murder rate was 9.8. Support for a handgun ban then rebounded, reaching a recent high of 43% of American in 1991, which was also one of the worst years for violent crime with a murder rate of 9.8. However, violent crime then fell sharply and has continued a gradual decline, and support for banning hand guns has declined along with it with only 29% of Americans supporting such a ban in 2010.

This suggests to me that Americans actually have a pretty reasonable approach to the question. Despite the occasional headline grabbing catastrophe, the current murder rate is down at the same level as the 1950s, despite the availability of Glock handguns and "assault rifles".

Hello AR-15

With thanks to my sister (whose link alerted to me to the existence of this), I present: The Hello Kitty AR-15

No, it's not a photoshop job, it's a real gun (though only one exists -- it was custom made not made for sale).

The author explains the rationale:

So called "Assault Weapons Bans" such as the now expired 1994 Clinton ban and the one still in place in states such as California seek to ban rifles that our misguided legislators feel have no purpose in civilian hands. They identify "evil features" they can use to generically classify these "military style" weapons in sweeping terms. Of course these features, such as plastic pistol grips, barrel shrouds, and bayonet lugs have absolutely nothing to do with the firearms potential lethality in the real world and are merely cosmetic features. After all, it really doesn't matter what color the firearm is if it fires the same ammunition right? Well, in the "spirit" of the California Assault Weapon Ban I decided to do my best to alleviate the fears of my fellow citizens and gun-banning legislators when I put together a new AR-15 for my wife. Below is the result of my painstaking work to transform an Evil Black Rifle (EBR) into a Cute Pink RIfle (CPR). Introducing the Hello Kitty AR-15!

This rifle is 100% legal in California because it is based on an "off-list" lower receiver made by Stag Arms and has no evil features at all, instead featuring a fixed stock instead of the evil collapsible stock, a muzzle brake in place of the vile flash-hider, and a MonsterMan Grip instead of the heinous and malicious plastic pistol grip. The C Products magazine looks like a 30 round magazine body but is permanently modified to only allow 10 rounds.

The Magical Mystery Glock

In the wake of the Tuscon shooting, there have been renewed call for gun control. This is hardly surprising, and while from my own point of view it seems like an attempt to make political hay out of widespread shock and fear, and I can certainly understand that for those who believe that our current gun laws make violence more common, this sort of event would seem to confirm their thesis. What is not, however, reasonable from those who believe that gun control would be a good thing for our country, is the odd fixation of the anti-gun lobby on the Glock brand.

The Glock 19

One common question from gun control advocates in the wake of the shooting was, "Why would any reasonable person think that civilians should need or want to own Glocks?" New York Times columnist Gail Collins summed up this line of thinking well in a column entitled "A Right to Bear Glocks?" Collins writes:

Today, the amazing thing about the reaction to the Giffords shooting is that virtually all the discussion about how to prevent a recurrence has been focusing on improving the tone of our political discourse. That would certainly be great. But you do not hear much about the fact that Jared Loughner came to Giffords’s sweet gathering with a semiautomatic weapon that he was able to buy legally because the law restricting their sale expired in 2004 and Congress did not have the guts to face up to the National Rifle Association and extend it.

If Loughner had gone to the Safeway carrying a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms, Giffords would probably still have been shot and we would still be having that conversation about whether it was a sane idea to put her Congressional district in the cross hairs of a rifle on the Internet.

But we might not have lost a federal judge, a 76-year-old church volunteer, two elderly women, Giffords’s 30-year-old constituent services director and a 9-year-old girl who had recently been elected to the student council at her school and went to the event because she wanted to see how democracy worked.

Loughner’s gun, a 9-millimeter Glock, is extremely easy to fire over and over, and it can carry a 30-bullet clip. It is “not suited for hunting or personal protection,” said Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign. “What it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people quickly.”

Almost everything Collins says about the Glock 19 9mm pistol in this section is misleading. The Glock 19 was not banned under the assault weapon ban which Congress allowed to expire in 2004. Indeed, I personally shot one at gun ranges (in hyper-restrictive California, no less) back in 2001-2003 several times. What was banned by that legislation was the manufacture or import of additional magazines which held more than 10 rounds. However, existing high capacity magazines (the standard Glock 19 magazine before the law passed as a 15-round magazine) were not banned and could be traded or resold freely. So while a 30-round clip such as Loughner used in the shooting would have been somewhat more expensive and harder to find between 1994 and 2004, it would not have been that hard. Glock simply issued new pistols manufactured between 1994 and 2004 with a modified magazine which held only ten rounds.

A Glock 19 with extended 30 round magazine

Contra Mr. Helmke's claim that the Glock 19 is "not suited for hunting or personal protection," and that instead, "What it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people quickly." the Glock 19 is in fact one of the most frequently carried police sidearms in large city police departments. Police, to my understanding, are generally issued pistols which are suited for personal protection, and are in fact seldom called upon to "kill and injure a lot of people quickly."

The fact of the matter is that the Glock is very much "a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms". What distinguishes it from other 9mm pistols (9mm is now the single most commonly used pistol calibre in the US) is simply that it is somewhat light, simpler in construction, and more reliable (depending on who you ask) than other similar guns.

Personally, having shot the Glock 19 and it's slightly larger framed cousin the Glock 17 a few times, if I were to buy a 9mm pistol I'd go for a metal framed model such as the Beretta 92FS. The Glocks simply feel to light to me, and I find the extra weight helps me keep a better aim. But as a quick look at the specifications of the Beretta 92FS shows, there's really no functional difference between the two in terms of the Glock being more of a danger to society.

The Beretta 92FS

As a quick glance down this guy's "top 25" list of 9mm's shows, the there's nothing that makes the Glock a particularly dangerous gun compared to basically all of the rest. Indeed, the only thing that makes the Glock 19 more dangerous than the centerfire pistol I would personally most like to own, the M1911 Colt .45, which this year will mark 100 years since it became standard in the US Army, is that the Glock, with its wider magazine an smaller cartridge, can carry 15 rounds in its standard factory magazine to the M1911's 7.

The Colt M1911 .45 turns 100 this year

It is true that holding more rounds in a clip can make a pistol more dangerous in a mass shooting such as Loughner's Tuscon rampage -- but magazines are in fact pretty quick to change out. In other mass shootings (such as the Virginia Tech massacre) the shooter has simply carried many standard-size magazines. Further, although mass shootings such as in Tuscon get much greater media attention, the vast majority of the 12,000 homicides involving guns each year in the US are the result of only a few shots being fired -- no different from decades ago when revolvers were far more popular than pistols.

So why the outcry against Glocks in particular, if there is nothing to set them out as particularly more deadly than handguns in general? Much of this may stem from the fact that many gun control advocates actually know every little about guns, and as such have the greatest tendency to believe false anti-gun reporting. In the mid-80s, when the Glock was first being brought to the US from Austria, gun control advocates saw a chance to achieve a quick win based on the new, high impact plastic technology which the Glock used in parts of its grips and frame. Articles were written claiming that these "plastic guns" were "terrorist specials" which could escape detection by metal detectors and x-ray machines in airports. Congress even proposed legislation to ban guns made of plastic. The problem was, the hysteria was based entirely on wrong facts. Although the Glocks did use more plastic than had been in older pistol designs, the barrel, slide, and a number of other parts were still metal. Containing more than a pound of metal (even unloaded), Glocks easily set off airport metal detectors and looked exactly like what they were under x-ray machines.

The law that congress eventually passed in 1988 banned any gun which contained less than 3.2oz of metal -- a criteria which resulted in exactly zero guns being banned by the law. Meanwhile, the Glocks won a loyal following both among police and civilian shooting enthusiasts. However, gun control advocates seem not quite to have got over their own mis-directed hype, and so the bogeyman of the evil "plastic gun" lives on, adding to the Glock's mystique, and thus making it all the more likely that the next twenty-something misfit who wants to go out with a "bang" will select one of the polymer-framed shooting bricks as his murder weapon.