When Guns Do What Guns Are Designed to Do

June 12, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

An assault rifle is designed to kill – to kill a lot of people, and quickly. That’s why it was created. That’s its primary function. For soldiers in combat, it’s a very good thing to have. If it could not kill lots of people, nobody would want it.

Manufacturing assault rifles in pink and posting pictures of young girls holding them doesn’t alter that basic purpose. Neither does the statistic that nearly all civilians who own them use them for fun. What that statistic means is that we as a nation have decided through our legislators that the fun of those gun owners is more important than the lives of 50 people in Orlando or 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose that the military developed small bomb, something like a hand grenade but much more powerful. It easily blows up a building and kills anything within a 50-yard radius. Soldiers find them to be very effective in combat.

The companies that manufacture these bombs also sell them to the public. Lots of people buy these bombs. Bomb stores spring up next to gun stores. They have names like Bombs Away or It’s Da Bomb – all in good fun. And in fact, nearly all of the buyers use them for fun – tossing them into empty fields. People go to bombing ranges that have small buildings put up so that patrons can blow them sky high. Of course, there are accidents. Bomb owners sometimes blow up themselves. Or their own houses with their children inside. 

But occasionally, once a year or so, someone tosses a bomb into a crowd of people or into a real building. Many people are killed. Predictably, liberals say that maybe we ought not allow these bombs to be freely sold. Maybe we ought not let them be sold at all. But the bomb lobby claims that bombs are armaments and therefore are protected by the Constitution from being restricted in any way, and besides, people need the bombs for their own protection. Our legislators, a majority of them, agree. The occasional slaughter is no reason to prevent everyone from getting a bomb.

The bomb lobby and the media will invariably refer to each slaughter as a “tragedy” –  unfortunate but unavoidable. After all, the bomber got his bombs legally. And if he did get them illegally, it just shows that bomb laws don’t work.