Guns for Hunting People Are Different: Legislation Should Reflect That [View all]

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/guns-for-hunting-people-are-different-legislation-should-reflect-that/276182/



As a gun guy who's also a journalist and professor in a town sometimes called "The Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor," I meet plenty of people who think I should be ashamed of myself. But in failing to address the challenges presented by the latest massacre of innocents, United States senators have done what nobody else has managed to do: make me, for the first time, truly embarrassed about the company I'm lumped with, including theirs.

In most states, it is illegal to hunt animals or birds with more than six rounds in a rifle or three in a shotgun. Why? Because if you can't kill within those limits you need remedial marksmanship (of the sort NRA Executive Vice President Wayne R. La Pierre reportedly required to bring him up to snuff). If you've got ten or even 30-shot replaceable clips, then you're holding arms for hunting humans--equipment that brings the Second Amendment face to face with the First Commandment.

I suspect that one reason indirect controls like tightened background checks repeatedly fail is that lots of people don't think they will be sufficiently effective. Neither do I. Assault rifles are rifles of mass destruction. We shouldn't be trying to make it safe to have them on the street. It's too late for that. We need to restrict homicide weapons to those licensed to hunt humans, in law enforcement and the military.

One way to do that is to change manufacturing standards for guns as we did in barring vehicles without seatbelts or catalytic converters. Civilian weapons should be required to conform to the more humane rules for hunting game. No amount of legislative fiddling will prevent Rambo-styles clips from replacing small ones if the structure of the gun isn't changed. The answer is to return long guns to traditional magazines internal to the weapons, themselves, limited to hunting restrictions.