<![CDATA[21 to buy long guns]]>

Feinstein seeks to alter Senate gun bill

June 23, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has a reputation as one of the most anti-Second Amendment lawmakers on Capitol Hill. While there are others trying to give her a run for the title, she has a long anti-gun history that will be hard for anyone to overcome.

You’d think that with all her years in the Senate and seeing a pathway she prefers being closed off, she’d be thrilled to see any gun control show up in that chamber.

And, to be fair, I’m sure she is.

However, that doesn’t mean she’s unwilling to try and change the bill.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today filed the Age 21 Act as an amendment to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the gun violence prevention bill pending before the Senate. The amendmentwould raise the minimum age to purchase assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines from 18 to 21.
Senator Feinstein reintroduced the Age 21 Act on May 19, five days after the massacre at a Buffalo supermarket and five days before the school shooting in Uvalde, each of which involved an 18-year-old who legally purchased an assault rifle.
“The Senate gun safety bill is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t address the major problem of teenagers owning weapons of war,” said Senator Feinstein. “It makes no sense that it’s illegal for someone under 21 to buy a handgun or even a beer, yet can legally buy an assault weapon. My amendment is a commonsense fix with broad public support that should receive bipartisan backing and I hope that it’s allowed a vote.”

My reaction upon reading this? I couldn’t help but think of Darth Vader’s whole “I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further” thing.

Now, what are the odds of this actually making it onto the bill? I’m going to guess they’re actually very slim. The deal, as it stands now, is rather precarious. Adding something like this will likely scuttle the bill entirely, making it unpalatable to all of the Republicans in that chamber, including those who reached the initial agreement.

After all, if this was doable, it would have been part of the deal in the first place since it was probably on the table at the start of negotiations. The fact that it’s not in the final package is pretty telling.

Yet Feinstein wants to put this amendment in the bill, changing it, and for what?

The truth is that I don’t see this amendment even getting a vote. Why? Because I can see Republicans voting for this amendment and thus scuttling the deal completely.

That kind of thing can happen, especially when you know good and well that not only will pretty much every Republican in the chamber vote against it, but you may lose support from someone like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin.

Additionally, there’s the fact that there’s no reason to believe that this amendment would actually accomplish anything. We have numerous examples of underage mass shooters who steal weapons from family members as it is. Raising the age won’t actually change that, either. It’ll just make it so older killers will have to steal guns, too.

So literally the only thing Feinstein’s amendment could accomplish is killing the Senate bill.

You’d think someone who’d been in the Senate that long would recognize that.

Letter to the editor seeks to disarm certain adults

May 16, 2022 by Tom Knighton Leave a Comment

Law-abiding citizens over the age of 18 can buy long guns in most states. Federal law restricts handguns–a fact that hasn’t stopped teenagers from getting them in our inner cities–but they can buy rifles. We generally don’t have a huge issue with that, either, recent events notwithstanding.

While there are exceptions, as with everything, the vast majority of 18- to 20-year-old gun owners are responsible folks. After all, they’re adults. They should be treated as such. That includes the full gamut of rights we afford all law-abiding adults in this country.

Yet a letter to the editor seeks to make the case that the majority should be disarmed due to the actions of the minority.

To the editor: I am appalled that a federal appellate Judge, a Trump appointee, would annul a law in California prohibiting the sale of semiautomatic rifles to individuals under 21 years old. Such rifles were used in the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.
The killer at Sandy Hook was 20, and in the high school student killings, the suspect was 19 years old.

The Sandy Hook killer’s age is irrelevant. After all, he murdered his mother–who was well above the age of 21–in order to obtain the rifle he used to carry out that particular atrocity.

Does anyone really and truly believe an age restriction on who could buy a firearm would have stopped him?

Really?

Moving on…

The judge’s reference to the heroic efforts of young Americans during the Revolutionary War is contrived and meaningless. It is not applicable to our military needs today.
The judge also fails to understand that the firearms used in the Revolutionary War were single-shot muskets, which took most soldiers about 20 seconds to load. In contrast, a young person can shoot more than one round per second using an AR-15.

Yeah, and?

Look, it’s true. The AR-15 fires much faster than a musket, but again, so what? There’s nothing in the Second Amendment that could even be taken to suggest that the Founding Fathers intended to restrict the definition of “arms” to just muskets?

Especially since many in the Revolution used rifles. But then again, our astute letter writer doesn’t actually know enough about firearms to understand the difference, yet we should still listen to them on a topic they’re clearly uneducated on.

Oh, but that history is irrelevant because it’s not “applicable to our military needs today.”

OK, since they brought it up, let me ask what age someone can enlist in the military without parental permission? That would be 18. You know, adults.

Sounds to me like if we’re going to trust 18- to 20-year-olds with tanks, artillery, hand grenades, and actual machine guns, we can trust them with a hunting rifle.

How many first-graders could have been saved at Sandy Hook if the shooter had a musket instead of an AR-15-style assault rifle? How many high schoolers in Florida would be alive if the shooter also wasn’t using an AR-15-style weapon?

How many more would have been killed if these maniacs had decided that since they couldn’t get something faster than a musket, they’d just use a bomb instead?

“What if” games are tricky things and the letter writer sucks at them.

The judge’s misuse of history overlooked the advances in rifle technology and how lethal such guns have become the weapons of choice for mass murderers.

The judges’–there was more than one on that panel, after all–accurate understanding of history and the Constitution isn’t about overlooking jack squat. Our Founding Fathers enshrined the right to keep and bear arms for a reason. Concerns about technology don’t negate that any more than the rise of the internet negated the right to a free press.

And that’s the best the letter writer could do.

Now, I don’t expect a solid grasp of the issue from letters to the editor. What I do expect is what I got here, the typical misunderstandings and misrepresentations of reality that are common among the gun control crowd. These are adults who they’re trying to disarm, not children who cannot be trusted.

However, I also see this kind of argument becoming far more common in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, so you might as well dig in for it.