The Blame Game

In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting people have rushed to place blame for what happened. I’ve noticed that where people lay the blame depends on what convenient scapegoat they can find that they’ve never liked and won’t be inconvenienced by if it’s banned. Right now the primary targets are guns, video games, and violent movies but in the past the scapegoats have included things like comic books, rock & roll music, and Dungeons & Dragons.

This blame is assigned without regard to the facts. Guns must be to blame because Britain and Japan have strong gun control laws and they don’t have this kind of violence. We’ll ignore Switzerland where people have easy access to military assault rifles, and I mean actual military assault rifles and not “military-style assault weapons,” and yet the Swiss violent crime rate is also low suggesting that easy access to firearms is not the problem. Violent video games and movies must be to blame because they desensitize us to violence while conditioning us to commit violent acts. We’ll ignore all the other countries in the world where they play the same video games and watch the same movies and yet don’t go on violent rampages.

Let me tell you where I place the blame. Back when I joined Facebook I did what a lot of people do. I “friended” a lot of my old college friends. About a week after reconnecting with one woman she made a snide comment about having just learned that her tennis partner was a fan of Ann Coulter. At the time I thought it was kind of tacky to be talking about the woman behind her back but I know Coulter is a polarizing figure so I just sort of shrugged it off. What happened next shocked me. Other people started posting some fairly vile, hate-filled comments about this woman that they clearly did not know. One man even said he’d like to whack her in the knees with a baseball bat. Most shocking to me was that my “friend” was clearly okay with this outpouring of hatred directed at a woman who probably thought she was her friend.

Since then I’ve seen many such occurrences from people ranging all across the political spectrum. When faced with someone whose beliefs differ from our own, all too often we don’t try to understand their point of view or engage them in a meaningful discussion of the issue. Instead we seek to demonize and dehumanize with hateful accusations that have no basis in reality. That way we don’t have to defend our own points of view much less consider the possibility that we’re wrong and they’re right. The thing is, our children learn by observing us. When we behave in a hateful manner we teach our children to behave in a hateful manner.

So if you’re looking for someone or something to blame for violence in our society, I suggest you start by taking a moment to look in the mirror and seriously reflect on what you’ve been teaching your children.

Assault Weapons: What Are They?

I’ve noticed when talking about gun control that there seems to be some confusion about what an assault weapon is and why it should or should not be banned. I thought it might be helpful to provide people with a side-by-side comparison of two semi-automatic firearms, one an assault weapon, the other not.

The gun on the left is an Intratec DC-9. The gun on the right is an Intratec AB-10. If you think they look a lot alike, that’s because they are basically the same gun. I mean that literally. The AB-10 is a DC-9 with a few cosmetic changes that don’t have much effect upon the operation of the gun. Both are cheap, mass produced weapons that fire the same caliber bullet from the same magazines and both guns are equally easy to convert to full automatic fire with the exact same parts. Yet one weapon was banned as an assault weapon and the other wasn’t. Why?

The Intratec TEC-9 was based on a prototype of a 9mm submachine gun developed for military applications. When they were unable to find a government buyer the company began production of a semi-automatic version for the US market where the gun proved popular with those wanting a cheap gun with an intimidating look.

Following the Cleveland School Massacre of 1989, California took measures to define and then ban assault weapons. Their definition was largely based on cosmetic factors in the apparent belief that guns are somehow more dangerous if they look dangerous. For example, one of the criteria for determining if a firearm is an assault weapon is if it accepts a detachable magazine outside of the pistol grip.

In order to circumvent California’s Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, which banned the Intratec TEC-9 by name, Intratec modified the TEC-9 into the TEC-DC9, the “DC” standing for “Designed for California.” The only difference between the TEC-9 and TEC-DC9 was that rings for a sling were moved from the side of the gun to a detachable metal clip on the back of the gun. That, along with a name change, was sufficient to circumvent California’s ban on assault weapons.

The TEC-9 and it’s variants such as the TEC-DC9 were also banned by name in the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. Again the ban was based largely on cosmetic factors that had little to do with the actual functioning of the gun. To circumvent the AWB Intratec merely removed the barrel shroud, eliminated some threading on the barrel, and renamed the gun the TEC-AB10.

If this gives you the impression that assault weapon bans are useless, well, that’s because they are. Bans on guns simply because they look dangerous plays well in the press because politicians can pose with dangerous looking weapons and pretend they are doing something about violent crime. The reality is that bans based on cosmetic factors are easily circumvented by simply changing a gun’s appearance without making it any less lethal.