This commentary was written by Norm Vandal, who is a resident of Roxbury.
Of course, I would obviously prefer a ban on assault-style weapons, but I have a few, major concerns with this approach.
For one, there are over twenty million of these weapons in circulation right now. Any ban that grandfathers these weapons will be effectively gutted before it passes, which will unfortunately not occur. These weapons are everywhere. If you divide the total by the number of states, that means each state has 400,000 assault weapons.
This is part of the NRA’s and the gun makers’ plan, the higher the numbers, the more difficult to ban the weapons. Why not place restrictions and regulations on this huge cache of weapons and create a revenue stream that will support counteracting the terrible cost they impose on society? Use the money to fund law enforcement, relevant education, medical expenditures, and mental health improvements. All these, and more, are severely impacted by these sinister weapons. If you can’t ban them, control them, and do it with money.
An outright ban smacks in the face of the right’s self-serving interpretation of the Second Amendment. Instead, when you take a position for legalization and regulation, you comply with recent Supreme Court positions and rulings regarding the constitutionality of the government’s right to regulate and control weapons.
There is precedent for this, in the regulation of automobiles, cigarettes and drugs. Licensure and registration are common for the ownership and operation of many possessions. These weapons should be prohibitively expensive to own.
Basically, money is why Republicans vote consistently against any gun control legislation. It’s about money. Of course, anyone knows this. It’s about huge profits and political contributions. So, let’s make control about money. Make ownership of these weapons appropriately expensive to cover the costs they inflict, and you will reduce the numbers substantially, and you will gain control.
When we continue to strive for an outright ban, manufacturers flood the market with more guns, gun people buy more guns in fear that they just might become banned, and the terrible cycle continues each and every minute while we continue to fail. We fail because of money. Huge money.
It’s ironic, but the main thing we have on our side to push for an outright ban is death. Death is on our side. We believe that if enough people die, some common sense will ensue. We essentially wait for more people to die in a quest for fewer people dying, eventually. We look at it as a potential, causal relationship.
Think about this. Does this make logical sense? It’s also ironic that as these mass killings continue to increase in number, people become desensitized and less and less reactive. How quickly we forget. Another sad irony is that when a killing takes place, people react in a counter-intuitive way by purchasing more weapons.
If you want to own an assault weapon, then it’s going to cost you a whole lot of money, and regulations will limit your ability to use it indiscriminately. If you own one or more presently, then it will cost a whole lot to keep them… legally. Licensure, registration, regulation, with appropriate and severe fines and penalties, will drastically reduce illegal weapons in circulation. Buy-back programs could further reduce numbers.
To continue on the fingers-crossed, right-is-might, common sense ban approach is a fruitless endeavor, and it translates directly into more people dying and more weapons circulating. In a way, pushing for an unachievable ban is part of the problem.
