M2RB: The Clash
When they kick out your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting in death row
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, Guns of Brixton
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting in death row
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, Guns of Brixton
So President Obama wants to keep guns like the AK-47 “in the hands of
soldiers.” But these are not military weapons. No self-respecting
military in the world would use them, and it is time for Obama to stop
scaring the American people.
By John Lott
‘AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not on the streets of our cities,” President Obama told
the National Urban League on Wednesday. After the deadly attack in
Colorado last Friday, the president’s concern is understandable.
However, even — or perhaps especially — at such a time, distinctions
need to be made.
The police in Aurora, Colo., reported that the killer used a Smith & Wesson M&P 15.
This weapon bears a cosmetic resemblance to the M-16, which has been
used by the U.S. military since the Vietnam War. The call has frequently
been made that there is “no reason” for such “military-style weapons”
to be available to civilians.
Yes, the M&P 15 and the AK-47 are “military-style weapons.” But
the key word is “style” — they are similar to military guns in their
aesthetics, not in the way they actually operate. The guns covered by
the federal assault-weapons ban (which was enacted in 1994 and expired
ten year later) were not the fully automatic machine guns used by the
military but semi-automatic versions of those guns.
The civilian version of the AK-47 uses essentially the same sorts of
bullets as deer-hunting rifles, fires at the same rapidity (one bullet
per pull of the trigger), and does the same damage. The M&P 15 is
similar, though it fires a much smaller bullet — .223 inches in
diameter, as opposed to the .30-inch rounds used by the AK-47.
The Aurora killer’s large-capacity ammunition magazines are also
misunderstood. The common perception that so-called “assault weapons”
can hold larger magazines than hunting rifles is simply wrong. Any gun
that can hold a magazine can hold one of any size. That is true for
handguns as well as rifles. A magazine, which is basically a metal box
with a spring, is also trivially easy to make and virtually impossible
to stop criminals from obtaining.
Further, the guns in a couple of recent mass shootings (including the
one in Aurora) have jammed because of the large magazines that were
used. The reason is simple physics. Large magazines require very strong
springs, but the springs cannot be too strong, or it becomes impossible
to load the magazines. Over time, the springs wear out, and when a
spring loses its ability to push bullets into the chamber properly, the
gun jams. With large springs, even a small amount of fatigue can cause
jams.
If Obama wants to campaign against semi-automatic guns based on their function, he should go after all semi-automatic guns. After all, in 1998, as an Illinois state senator, he supported just such a ban – a ban that would eliminate most of the guns in the United States.
But despite Obama’s frightening image of military weapons on America’s
streets, it is pretty hard to seriously argue that a new ban on “assault
weapons” would reduce crime in the United States. Even research done
for the Clinton administration didn’t find that the federal assault-weapons ban reduced crime.
Indeed, banning guns on the basis of how they look, and not how they operate, shouldn’t be expected
to make any difference. And there are no published academic studies by
economists or criminologists that find the original federal
assault-weapons ban to have reduced murder or violent crime generally.
There is no evidence that the state assault-weapons bans reduced murder
or violent-crime rates either. Since the federal ban expired in
September 2004, murder and overall violent-crime rates have actually fallen. In 2003, the last full year before the law expired, the U.S. murder rate was 5.7 per 100,000 people. Preliminary numbers for 2011 show that the murder rate has fallen to 4.7 per 100,000 people.
In fact, murder rates fell immediately after September 2004, and they fell more in the states without assault-weapons bans than in the states with them.
Nevertheless, the fears at the time were significant. An Associated Press headline warned, “Gun shops and police officers brace for end of assault weapons ban.” It was even part of the presidential campaign that year: “Kerry blasts lapse of assault weapons ban.”
An Internet search turned up more than 560 news stories in the first
two weeks of September 2004 that expressed fear about ending the ban.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the fact that murder and other violent crime
declined after the ban ended was hardly covered in the media.
If we finally want to deal seriously with multiple-victim public
shootings, it is about time that we acknowledge a common feature of
these attacks: With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last
year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people
have been killed since at least 1950 has occurred in a place where
citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms. The Cinemark movie
theater in Aurora, like others run by the chain around the country,
displayed warning signs that it was prohibited to carry guns into the
theater.
So President Obama wants to keep guns like the AK-47 “in the hands of
soldiers.” But these are not military weapons. No self-respecting
military in the world would use them, and it is time for Obama to stop
scaring the American people.
— John R. Lott Jr. is a FOXNews.com contributor. He is an economist and the author of More Guns, Less Crime, published in a greatly expanded third edition by the University of Chicago Press (2010).
Related Reading:
Jimmy's Got A Gun
Guns of Brixton - The Clash
When they kick out your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting in death row
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, Guns of Brixton
The money feels good
And your life you like it well
But surely your time will come
As in heaven, as in hell
You see, he feels like Ivan
BORN under the Brixton sun
His game is called survivin'
At the end of the harder they come
You know it means no mercy
They caught him with a gun
No need for the Black Maria
Goodbye to the Brixton sun
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh-the guns of Brixton
When they kick out your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
You can crush us
You can bruise us
And even shoot us
But oh- the guns of Brixton
Shot down on the pavement
Waiting in death row
His game was survivin'
As in heaven as in hell
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
When the law break in
How you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement
Or waiting in death row
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, Guns of Brixton
The money feels good
And your life you like it well
But surely your time will come
As in heaven, as in hell
You see, he feels like Ivan
BORN under the Brixton sun
His game is called survivin'
At the end of the harder they come
You know it means no mercy
They caught him with a gun
No need for the Black Maria
Goodbye to the Brixton sun
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh-the guns of Brixton
When they kick out your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
You can crush us
You can bruise us
And even shoot us
But oh- the guns of Brixton
Shot down on the pavement
Waiting in death row
His game was survivin'
As in heaven as in hell
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you'll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
Oh, the guns of Brixton
No comments:
Post a Comment