How the AR-15 Became The Plastic Straws Of The Gun World

Selwyn Duke at the American Thinker today explains how How The AR-15 Became The Plastic Staw Of The Gun World. And just as banning plastic straws will do next to nothing about pollution in the world's oceans, banning AR-15s will have a minuscule effect on crime.

How did AR-15s become the plastic straws of the gun world? It’s simple: Demagogues need scapegoats. Yet just as banning plastic straws won’t make a dent in the ocean-polluting plastics problem, banning “assault rifles” (which aren’t) won’t save even one life.

...snip...

Joining straws in the dock, and giving new meaning to demonizing the one percent, are Assault Rifles™. Not only are they used in approximately just one percent of homicides, they aren’t even “assault rifles,” a term that had always referred to weapons that could be fired fully automatic or in more than one way (fully auto, three-shot bursts, etc). Now the term is being applied to semi-automatic (one trigger pull, one shot) rifles with certain cosmetic features (a military “look”), which is a bit like putting a Porsche body on a Yugo chassis and claiming the car will win races.

But, hey, as anti-gun crusader Josh Sugarmann once put it, these “weapons’ menacing looks,” coupled with the public’s confusion — “anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

Yeah, it’s a con.

As Duke goes on to make clear later in the article, the AR-15, far from being weapon that fires a very powerful round, the 5.56 NATO round is a pipsqueak of a round, which is popular precisely for its low recoil and ease of use. And, of course, the rifle itself looks cool. While it can be used for hunting varmints, it should not be used for game even as small as deer for fear one would wound the deer rather than kill it outright.  The rifle is also popular because it is the tinker toy of the gun world, allowing the owner to customize it to meet his or her special needs.

No, the Left is not really worried that this is a highly effective "weapon of war."  What this is really about is symbolic.  If they can ban a class of arms, any class at all, and make it stick, they can effectively nullify the Second Amendment without having to repeal it.  It's the way the Left works. They see nothing wrong with with attacking from the flanks when a direct assault doesn't work.  This is how one fights a war, not how one conducts politics, but from this you can see that we are truly fighting a war.  The Republicans seem to think they are sincere, and want to accommodate them.  Unfortunately there is nothing sincere about it.  They want us disarmed so they can push their foul agenda uninhibited.

Update on a related issue:  Please read Rachel Malone's piece entitled There Isn't Enough Due Process To Make Red Flag Laws Tolerable. Here point is that any amount of due process can not cover the fact that "Red Flag" laws target alleged "thought crimes." But nobody truly knows what another is thinking. It's what makes red flag laws so terrible, and do easily abused.