Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
n a debate with CNN host Piers Morgan last week, Newt Gingrich was asked whether the Second Amendment guarantees the right to possess automatic weapons. Basically, he said no, it does not.
“I think .50-caliber machine guns would be bizarre,” Gingrich said. “And I’m happy to say that those rules seem to work fairly well.”
It’s an interesting admission. Like many others on the right, Gingrich accepts and even embraces the power of government to effectively ban possession of .50 caliber machine guns and other automatic weapons. Yet somehow, he believes that under the Second Amendment, the government has no similar power to ban semi-automatic assault weapons.
But where does he find that constitutional distinction between automatic and semi-automatic? What textual basis in the Second Amendment would allow government to heavily regulate and in effect ban one type of weapon, while prohibiting similar regulation of others?
An excellent point and one I’ve made myself. The word “arms” is so ridiculously broad that the term “right to bear arms” practically begs government to limit the right — which it does. Not only can’t you have an fully-automatic rifle, a whole raft of arms from hand grenades all the way up to atomic weapons are banned for civilian ownership.
But let’s take this argument in a different direction. If criminals will always be able to get banned weapons, then why don’t they? You don’t hear much about fully-automatic weapons used in crimes. They used to be used by criminals all the time (Bonnie and Clyde, George “Machine Gun Kelly” Barnes, John Dillinger, etc.), but then the government restricted them and — poof — they pretty much disappeared as a national problem. Turns out that when government outlawed machine guns, outlaws didn’t have machine guns.
Weird, huh? It’s like an example of a gun restriction that worked. As always, the pro-any-gun-you-want arguments make a lot of sense, until you figure in the facts. Then they’re revealed as laughable horseshit.
