On December 9, 2007, a deranged 24 year-old named Matthew Murray killed four people and wounded five others in a pair of shootings that took place in Arvada and Colorado Springs.
The tragic shootings came only days after a 19 year-old gunman opened fire at a busy department store in Omaha, Nebraska, killing eight people.
What tied these shootings together is that both incidents occurred with guns that, until four years ago, were illegal under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (FAWB).
Even though President George W. Bush expressed his desire to renew the Assault Weapons Ban, he and the Republican-controlled Congress allowed the ban to expire in 2004.
Last month, however, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Obama administration intends to push for the reauthorization of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, but the administration is meeting resistance from many within its own party, including Congresswoman Betsy Markey and Congressman John Salazar.
In the Fort Collins Coloradoan over the weekend, Markey said: “I am a staunch supporter of Second Amendment rights. I believe it is a mistake to deny constitutional rights to all Americans because of the misdeeds of a few.”
A statement like Markey’s fails to see compromise in the complexities of the gun control debate, and it thwarts common sense efforts to keep the most dangerous weapons out of the hands of criminals and extremists. The original FAWB was a ten-year ban on the “manufacture, transfer, and possession” of semiautomatic firearms that have features useful for military and criminal applications but are unnecessary for shooting sports or self-defense.
The ban included weapons like AK-47s, Uzi machine pistols, the TEC-9, and Revolving Cylinder Shotguns (also known as Street Sweepers).
It also banned guns with ammunition loading devices holding more than 10 bullets and guns with two or more military features, including flash suppressors, silencers, pistol grips, grenade launchers, and bayonet mounts.
The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence noted that in the ten years the ban was in place, the incidence of assault weapons being traced to crimes dropped 66%.Echoing similar findings, a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2004 found that the share of gun crimes using assault weapons declined anywhere from 17% to 72% in the six localities included in the study. Since the gun ban has expired, however, the Brady Center notes that hundreds of people have been killed with assault weapons, including 38 police officers. In Miami alone, the number of gun related crimes using assault weapons have climbed from 4% of all gun crimes to 20%. What’s more, in a Washington Post/ABC News Survey taken in October 2006, 61% of the American public favored stricter gun-control laws, while only 36% opposed them.
Opposing the FAWB because a categorical interpretation of Second Amendment offers little defense against these social realities, especially given the Supreme Court’s understanding of the controversial amendment.
Indeed, until recently, the Supreme Court and the bulk of scholarly opinion have viewed the right to bear arms as a collective right of the State to arm and regulate militias rather than an individual right bestowed on every American.
Last summer’s Supreme Court decision in District of Columbia v. Heller overturned that legal consensus. However, even the Heller decision did not say that there was an unlimited individual right to bear arms.
Antonin Scalia, the intellectual anchor of the Court’s conservative wing and the author of Heller, argued that even though the D.C. ban on virtually all handguns was unconstitutional, a wide variety of gun laws are still presumably constitutional, including bans on “the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” or prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual” weapons.
Reauthorizing the FAWB is not tantamount to nullifying the Second Amendment. The realities of gun-ownership for rural farmers and hunters on the Eastern plains are no doubt different from teenagers and minorities plagued by gang-violence in parts of Denver.
The FAWB does not seek to take away firearms from responsible gun-owners and hunters; rather, it represents the pragmatic belief that we can uphold the Second Amendment while also keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals.
Ryan Dawkins is a life-long resident of northern Colorado. He recently finished his M.A. in American History from Ohio State University. He lives in Loveland and works as a restaurant manager. EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an online-only column and has not been edited.
