What I Fear, What Made Me Drag my Feet on Gun Control: Brady-Style Gun Control

[TPaine7]

84. I'm confused. You spoke in your last post about "sport shooting enthusiasts."

You realize there are entire events and competitions that exclusively use so called "assault weapons"?

One difficulty with simply outlawing them is what the Supreme Court has said on the Second Amendment. First, the Miller court said that a gun is not necessarily protected by the Second Amendment unless it is militarily useful. They found that since, as far as they knew, a sawed-off shotgun was not militarily useful, they had no reason to rule that it was protected.

Of course, the semi-automatic so called "assault weapons" are militarily useful. (AFAIK, they are not used by any military in the world--their military counterparts shoot either 3 round bursts or as long as the trigger is held down, but many soldiers are trained not to use the three round bursts)

By the logic of Miller, since these guns are militarily useful, they are protected.

Secondly the Heller Court said that guns in common use for legal purposes are protected. By that logic, so called "assault weapons" are also protected; they are a subset of rifles, a category of weapons that are used to kill less than hands and feet (again based on remembered statistics), and they are definitely in common use—they're the most popular rifles in America.

So, by the logic of the Supreme Court—twice!—so-called "assault weapons" are protected weapons.

A better approach would possibly be licensing so called "assault weapons" and applying special storage requirements. Also, the owner should have a legal duty to prevent access to anyone who is, or who the owner suspects of being, unfit (due to criminal history or mental issues). If the shooter's mom, whose plan to have him committed is said to have set him off, had secured her guns away from the son she thought incompetent/insane, this might not have happened. It is possible that a serious law to that effect would have caused this law-abiding woman to store her guns away from her house.