Nicholas Johnson wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal about firearms policy.
In the wake of horrific crimes like the recent mass shooting in Oregon, many in the political class respond as if there were an easy way to keep such tragedies from happening. If it weren’t for the stubbornness of the National Rifle Association, the story goes, these deadly incidents could be prevented. Democratic presidential frontrunnerHillary Clinton urged “sensible restraints,” and said if she is elected president she would use her executive authority to impose them.
This sort of rhetoric suggests that there is a workable policy sitting on the shelf, ready for implementation. It also attempts to have it both ways, suggesting that effective gun control is possible without reaching into America’s gun safes and disarming ordinary citizens.
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Gun owners and Second Amendment activists understand that Howard Metzenbaum was absolutely right about the logic of supply-side gun control. So they resist incremental gun controls on the understanding that the latest proposal cannot be the last step. And when these half-measures fail, in either passage or effectiveness, progressives can always blame the “gun lobby.”
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As a candidate, Barack Obama said that he had no interest in trying to take peoples’ firearms. Now, beyond the influence of voters, the president has begun to elaborate his true inclinations. This month he praised Australia’s far-reaching gun-control efforts. In 1996, after a lunatic used a semiautomatic rifle to kill 34 people in Tasmania, the Australian government banned all semiautomatic rifles and repeating shotguns. Owners of these roughly 700,000 firearms (about a quarter of the country’s three million total guns) were required to turn them in for destruction. The government called this a “buyback,” but no one had a choice.
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So, to the glib critics of America’s gun culture: You cannot continue to have it both ways. If vast reductions in the supply of guns are the key to stopping mass shootings, tell us precisely what policies you propose. And then tell us how you intend to square those policies with the fact that Americans already own hundreds of millions of firearms.
If you cannot reconcile these two things, then you owe America’s lawful gun owners a different conversation: One in which you try to convince them that they’d be better off under policies that would disarm good people in a fruitless attempt to keep bad men from getting guns.
Read the full piece (subscription required).