What’s in Assault Weapons for YOU?

If gun advocates really want to protect the 2^nd Amendment, they would be well advised to disclaim assault weapons. They’ve been banned before and they will be banned again. Why confuse the argument?

The 2^nd Amendment is fairly precise in its statement: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The elemental phrase of this sentence is “a well-regulated militia.” We have that. It’s called the national guard. And yes, these well-regulated military units possess weapons. No one is infringing their right to bear those arms.

And no one is calling for a ban on all guns. The only source of that hue and cry is the National Rifle Association which uses that particular lie to strengthen its grip on the minds of a certain type of person. It’s also a useful lie to sell when your primary objective is to profit from the sale of any and all firearms, mass shootings be damned.

Are military-style weapons really so important that gun owners are willing to risk losing even more rights? This is a no-win argument, conflating assault rifles with more traditional firearms. If the objective is to strengthen the 2^nd Amendment, a smart strategy would be to distance personal gun ownership from assault rifles.

It bears saying again that at the time the 2^nd Amendment was written, the Founding Fathers did not and could not conceive of a gun like modern day assault rifles.  Even the most basic revolver was unheard of to the common man. Fast forward to a more crowded, more urban, and more vulnerable population and add in the well-demonstrated threat to human life posed by assault weapons and you face the certainty that the Founding Fathers would have excluded assault weapons from the 2^nd Amendment.

And let’s get real. What exactly does anyone expect to do with an assault rifle? They are not sporting guns. They are built to kill as many people as possible in the shortest possible amount of time. So unless you plan on becoming yet another mass murderer, you don’t need one.

It seems that assault-rifle aficionados live in fantasy land, believing that they must have such weapons to protect themselves from a potentially tyrannical government. All one must do to see through this delusion is to look at recent uprisings such as the rebellion in Syria. Entire cities have been destroyed in the government’s willingness to wipe out these rebels—chemical weapons, barrel bombs, white phosphorus bombs, entire populations of men, women, and children killed in their homes, schools and hospitals.

Never think for one minute that an armed insurrection within the United States would be met with less than deadly force. We’ve seen a few minor efforts along those lines. The Branch Davidians springs to mind, you know, that group of armed religionists who ended up burning themselves to death at Waco, Texas, rather than yield to the government. Or maybe the role model would be the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, a white supremacist militia group based in Arkansas that was active in the late 1970s and the ’80s.

These bands of brothers with their camo trucks, prepper shelters, food rations, and an arsenal of AR-15s are hallucinating if they believe they can stand against the U. S. military. The idea is laughable. Even illegal grenade launchers and machine guns won’t help them. Will they shoot at the sky as Patriot missiles start flying their way? What happens when a few M270 rocket launch systems rumble into range? They’ll not even see the high-flying jets dropping cluster bombs. They won’t hear the Abrams tanks rolling toward them until the first rounds start blowing them and their shelters into the next life.

The reality is that U.S. citizens with assault weapons will have zero impact as resistance fighters against a government gone rogue. We already have a way to ensure that our government doesn’t go rogue. It’s called voting.

Then there’s meeting with legislators, running for election, and forming cogent arguments to be voiced among friends and neighbors. It’s called citizenship.

And if the scenario is a world where governments have crumbled and nothing is left but little groups of tough men fighting for God and the American Way, who are they fighting? Other Americans who also have AR-15s? What happens when the ammunition runs out? Why not do that first?

Assault weapons do not belong in the hands of civilians. So let’s get past that whole insanity and start working toward a peaceful future for everyone. Enough already.