Writing at Reason magazine Friday morning, contributing editor J.D. Tuccille declared Washington State’s newly-signed ban on so-called “assault weapons” is flash and bad substance.
“It doesn’t bode well for a law,” Tuccille observed in his opening paragraph, “when you immediately notice the measure’s impotence against people who will inevitably evade or ignore its dictates. The law’s contempt for constitutional protections doesn’t improve its prospects.”
Democrat Gov. Jay Inslee was all smiles as he inked the legislation, SHB 1240, which immediately took effect. It also immediately drew two federal lawsuits and one state-level lawsuit, with more legal challenges anticipated. Inslee and Attorney General Bob Ferguson, also a Democrat, dismissed the lawsuits, predicting the new law will stand constitutional scrutiny.
“Of course,” Tuccille wrote, “lots of what legislatures pinch out these days is stupid and unconstitutional, so let’s be clear that we’re discussing Washington state’s new ‘assault weapons’ ban, a rearguard action in an already failed effort to deny self-defense rights to Americans.”
The Reason article took Inslee to task for misrepresenting history when he argued “assault weapons” were designed solely for the military to kill people.
Inslee’s new gun ban lists some 50 specific firearm models and also applies to their look-alikes. Among the Evergreen State’s roughly 1.5-2 million gun owners, there is no way to estimate the number of people who own such firearms. The number could be in the hundreds of thousands, yet with all of that semiautomatic hardware in private hands, the number of homicides in the state annually amount to fewer than ten, with is a fraction of all the murders committed with firearms in Washington in any given year.
As might be expected, the people responsible for the gun ban don’t seem able to define an “assault weapon,” except that they have an action which operates by the discharge of a round in the chamber, and that they may have scary looking cosmetic features including pistol grips, detachable magazines, folding or telescoping stocks, muzzle brakes, barrel shrouds and flash suppressors.
“Even if the ban stands as a matter of law,” Tuccille concluded, “it will join its counterparts elsewhere as a challenge to be overcome by innovators, or as a rights violation to be defied by gun enthusiasts. So far, innovators and enthusiasts are the clear winners. Politicians may enjoy passing restrictive and intrusive laws, but they have yet to find any way to make the public comply.”
