On November 12, the St. Paul City Council unanimously approved what it called “a comprehensive gun violence prevention ordinance.” The new regulation would prohibit possession of assault weapons, large-capacity magazines, binary triggers, and ‘ghost guns’ within city limits and add some more sensitive places.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said, “Saint Paul stands ready to act on day one when the state lifts preemption. This ordinance represents a collective effort by local leaders taking a long-overdue step to protect our children, families, and neighbors. Too many have suffered the unimaginable while others debated. It’s time for state leaders to meet us in this moment of urgency and safeguard the future our children deserve.”
Note the part about state preemption: That’s the kicker. When it comes to regulating guns, Minnesota has a strong state preemption law; even big cities can’t adopt ordinances more restrictive than state laws. So a coalition of 17 or 18 (depending on who’s counting) cities—representing about a quarter of Minnesota’s state population—have agreed to advance similar ordinances, hoping to get the legislature to yield.
The force behind all this foolishness is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, best remembered for supplying comedic relief during the 2024 Presidential Election. Like most Democratic pols, Walz wants an assault weapons ban and tried to call a special legislative session to ram one through. However, the Minnesota Legislature turned him down.
Walz then embarked on a series of town hall meetings, enlisting the aid of cities to pressure state lawmakers to cave in.
Walz’s mania is just a symptom of a more serious issue: Banamania, the fixation of Democratic politicians and gun-grabbers, in general, on a type of law that has never been shown to have any impact at all. Like the riskiest of the patent nostrums hawked by the old traveling medicine shows, the best you could hope for is it won’t make things worse.
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask banamaniacs how they imagine a ban would prevent anything? It wouldn’t even ban the guns. The cost of an Australian-style buyback would be prohibitive.
Last January, the National Shooting Sports Foundation estimated 30.7 million rifles like the AR-15 had been manufactured since 1990. The vast majority are still in circulation and it’s likely a large percentage of them are owned by American civilians. Pass a ban and every one of them will be right where it was before the ban. All that would be prohibited would be sales of new guns to private citizens and a rush to buy existing inventory prior to a ban becoming effective would add significantly to the supply.
S. 1531, the latest version of the federal assault weapons ban, has a new twist: 90 days after the law goes into effect, the existing guns would no longer be transferable to anyone without an FFL. Gosh, sounds ominous, but who’s going to know? A federal registry of guns and gun owners has been prohibited since May 19, 1986, when the Firearm Owners Protection Act became effective. A few states have or have tried to create their own registries of certain types of firearms. They have encountered “difficulties.” New York tried in 2013 and the most optimistic noncompliance rate was 82 percent.
Contrary to former President Joe Biden’s senile maunderings, the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban was not a success. It had a negligible impact on crime or the use of rifles in murders, a negative impact on mass shootings, and produced no benefit whatsoever to public safety.
In spite of the hype and hysteria, fewer than 100 of these guns have been used in mass shootings and that figure includes the 22 stockpiled by the Las Vegas killer, multiple rifles used in the Inland Regional Center and Rancho Tehama incidents and even guns shooters brought with them and didn’t use.
In spite of this, banamaniacs have constructed what amounts to a mythology, ascribing capabilities unmatched by any firearm in history to what are essentially normal semiautomatic rifles functionally the same as those sold to American citizens for more than a century.
Consider this passage from Cook County Attorney Eileen Burke O’Neil’s recent brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in Viramontes v. Cook County. It refers to the 1922 incident at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas: “While these children were dying, the law enforcement officers who swore an oath to protect them waited outside and ‘focused on calls for additional SWAT equipment,’ paralyzed by the sheer destructive capac“ity of the war weapon they faced.”
The “war weapon” was a Daniel Defense DDM4 V7 rifle. The killer also had a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 Volunteer VX, but it was left in his car. Saying hundreds of law enforcement officers were “paralyzed” by this zooms straight past absurd to a nearly pathological delusion.
Despite the fact that claims for assault weapons bans get smacked down by reality at every encounter, banamaniacs and their fellow travelers continue to make those same claims in their almost rabid drive to impose bans nationwide. An irresponsible media is complicit in helping them achieve that goal.
It’s nearly Orwellian.
It’s time for an intervention. A single one-word question and an insistence on an answer can be a good start. The question is “How?” and it should be asked often in the most public venues possible. We especially need to persuade our elected representatives at the state and federal levels to pose the same question. This isn’t strictly a Second Amendment issue; it’s a matter of truly bad public policy.
About Bill Cawthon
Bill Cawthon first became a gun owner 55 years ago. He has been an active advocate for Americans’ civil liberties for more than a decade. He is the information director for the Second Amendment Society of Texas.
End the act of 1934 and all others after it and have the federal government proclaim Constitutional Carry all across the land without exception and then we will be able to get handle on this problem. Claim that the AR is Americas rifle and should be celebrated and observed. Until that is done, the left has an easy paved and paid for with our tax dollars opportunity to take our guns away from us. If that cannot be done, then a new law that states anytime a new law is introduced that is against any constitutional right, equal funding will… Read more »