TruthNews Commentary, September 19, 2004

Liberals have been all in a dither about the assault weapon ban that expired last week. Listening to some of the hysteria, it sounds like you can now go down to your local Wal-Mart and buy a machine gun. The resulting mayhem in the streets would make the battle of Verdun look like a children's squabble.

Well, I had a different take on the expiration of the ban. It's long been a dream of mine to go hunting with a machine gun. Hunting with an ordinary rifle, firing one shot at a time, seemed too boring to be worth the trouble. But going into the forest and spraying anything that moves with hundreds of rounds of hot lead would be almost as much fun as a video game.

So I went down to the local gun store the day after the ban expired and asked to buy a machine gun. The clerk looked at me as if I were stupid. "You can't buy a machine gun," he said. "They've been banned since 1933."

"But the ban just expired," I pointed out. "When are you going to start stocking machine guns?"

The clerk then called his manager for clarification. "That's the assault weapons ban that expired," the manager explained. "All it banned was semi-automatic weapons that look like assault rifles." An assault rifle, he went on to explain, is a short range automatic rifle used by the military -- essentially a small machine gun. "We've always sold semi-automatic weapons," the manager added. A semi-automatic weapon, it turns out, fires one shot each time you pull the trigger. Automatic weapons, or machine guns, have always been banned -- at least since 1933. Some rifles, like the one Lee Harvey Oswald used to assassinate President Kennedy, use a manual bolt to load the next round from the magazine into the firing chamber. So a semi-automatic rifle is a step up from the bolt action, but it's still not a true machine gun which fires continuously as long as you hold down the trigger.

"Well, what's the point of banning semi-automatic rifles that look like machine guns, but allowing semi-automatic rifles that look like hunting rifles?" I asked the helpful gun store folks. Neither the manager nor clerk had an answer for this, but the manager muttered something about politicians being more interested in appearances than in reality.

"So the only thing I can do now that I couldn't do before is buy a gun that looks like a machine gun?" I asked in disappointment.

"Yeah, but you could do that anyway," the manager said. "The most common assault rifle in use today is the U.S. Army's M-16. It's a small machine gun. The assault weapon ban was supposed to eliminate semi-automatic rifles that look like the M-16. But the assault weapon ban didn't ban the AR-15, the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M-16."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well, politicians always put loopholes into laws," the manager explained. "They want to make it look like they're doing something, but they don't want to shut down factories and cause people to lose jobs. So they said the pistol grip could stay on the gun as long as it didn't have a collapsible stock. Since the AR-15 didn't have a collapsible stock, we could continue to sell it. Oh, and they also required us to limit the magazine to only 10 bullets."

"So a criminal can only kill 10 cops before he reloads," I observed. "Makes a lot of sense to me."

"Well, you could always buy a used clip that was manufactured before the law went into effect," the manager pointed out. "Then you could fire 15 or 20 rounds before reloading. That was another loophole."

"Well," I said to the manager, "all of this makes no sense to me. The news shows were saying I could buy a machine gun once the ban expired. But if I can't buy a machine gun, how about a flame thrower?" I figured that, if I were hunting deer, a flame thrower could cover about as wide an area as a machine gun, with the added benefit of cooking the meat.

"No flamethrowers, machine guns, grenades, rockets, missiles, cannons, or bazookas," the manager said. "All we're allowed to sell is rifles, shotguns, and pistols. Provided they're only semi-automatic, bolt action, or single shot. Everything else is banned." He paused for a moment, and then looked me in the eye. "And don't ask me for lawn darts, either. They've been banned since 1988. Too dangerous."