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Just under a month ago, Judge Robert Benitez overturned California’s assault weapon ban, a ruling greeted with hosannas from the mountaintops of Gun-nut Nation, and with equally-loud expressions of dismay and anger from the gun-control side. The judge called the 1989 ban a ‘failed experiment’ because the prohibition did not do what it was supposed to do, namely, protect California residents from the threat to public safety allegedly represented by that type of gun.

To the contrary, Judge Benitez found that the ‘modern sporting rifle,’ or AR-15, had become a favored consumer product for self-defense. Moreover, from testimony and briefs presented at the trial, if anything, the AR-15 was a better and more reliable self-defense weapon than a handgun. And since the Heller decision recognizes the ‘right’ of citizens to keep self-defense weapons in their homes, the California assault-rifle ban needed to be shut down.

How did our friends in Gun-control Nation respond? By doing what they usually do, which was to attack the credibility and the testimony of the pro-gun witnesses, leading off with the ‘mis-information’ provided to the District Court by the hated John Lott. So, for example, Devin Hughes backs up his criticism of Lott’s ‘mis-information’ by citing data which shows that California had the 7th-lowest rate of gun deaths in 2020.

There’s only one little problem.  Hughes got this ‘data’ from Giffords, which based its ranking of California’s gun-death rate on all causes of gun deaths, not just deaths from gun assaults. The moment you pull gun suicides out of the overall number of gun deaths, California becomes the 28th highest of all 50 states.  And there’s no discussion at all about suicides and assault rifles in the California case. Who’s mis-informing who (or whom?)

What bothers me about the reaction of Gun-control Nation to the Benitez decision is that it’s a perfect example of what the gun-control community gets wrong whenever it attempts to either promote more regulations of guns (i.e., an assault-weapons ban) or tries to block an attempt by the other side to make it easier for people to buy, own and use guns. What Gun-control Nation gets wrong again and again, is that you don’t regulate an industry when your knowledge of that industry and its products add up to zilch.

The stupidest section of the Benitez decision (Section III, A, 1) was where the Judge ran through a whole series of examples to ‘prove’ that the ‘prohibited features’ on the AR-15 (adjustable stock, handgrip, etc.) makes the gun a much more effective weapon for home defense than a pistol or a shotgun, the usual weapons that people keep around their homes for self-defense.

So what if the hand grip makes it easier for someone defending their home because they only need to hold the gun with one hand? So what if an adjustable stock makes it easier to keep the gun’s recoil under control? The whole point about the AR-15, which not one so-called ‘expert’ for the State of California pointed out, was that the AR-15 wasn’t designed to be a ‘sporting’ gun. It was designed to do one thing and one thing only; namely, to end human life.

And not just to end one human life. The kid who broke his way into the Sandy Hook school in 2012 needed less than 5 minutes to shoot and kill 26 adults and children, and much of that time was spent moving from room to room. In the slightly less than 3 minutes that he actually used the gun, he fired off more than 90 rounds. That’s a sporting gun?

Until and unless my friends in Gun-control Nation start learning something about the industry and the products produced by that industry that they want to regulate in more effective ways, they will continue to find themselves losing legal arguments to the Gun-nut gang. Would the SEC roll out a new regulation without first running it past people who actually work in Wall Street firms?

What Is An Assault Rifle?: Weisser, Michael R.: 9798728410980: Amazon.com: Books

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