With the
ease of downloading a song, anyone with a computer and a credit card can order
thousands of bullets and shotgun shells on the Internet, along with tear-gas
canisters and speed loaders. They can get the same high-capacity ammunition
clips that infantry soldiers use. They can even get bulletproof vests and SWAT
helmets. All without fear of a single background check.
No one is paying attention to whether buyers have criminal histories or
mental-health records. No one is monitoring bulk sales of ammunition to see who
might be building an arsenal. Even after a young man in Colorado buys 6,000
rounds by mail order and uses them to commit mass murder, it is the rare
politician who proposes to make the tools of terror slightly harder to obtain.
When he was campaigning for office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to reinstate the
assault weapons ban that had expired in 2004. That would have prohibited the
AR-15 rifle used in the Colorado theater shooting on Friday, along with the
large 100-round magazine attached to it. But as president, Mr. Obama has made no
attempt to do so. Mitt Romney banned assault weapons as governor of
Massachusetts and undoubtedly saved many lives, but now he opposes all gun
control measures. He never repeats what he said in 2004 when he signed the ban:
“Deadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts,” he said. “They are
instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing
people.”
Both men fear the power of gun ideologues, particularly in swing states like
Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina, where many voters have fallen under the
spell of a gun lobby that considers any restriction an unthinkable assault on
the Constitution. Senator Ron Johnson, the Tea Party favorite from Wisconsin,
spoke for the Republican Party (and many Democrats) when he said that limiting
high-capacity magazines would infringe on a basic right. “When you try and do
it, you restrict our freedom,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Freedom to do what, precisely? To fire off 100 rounds without reloading? A few
sport shooters may enjoy doing that on a firing range, but that’s hardly
sufficient reason to empower someone else to do it in a movie theater. It has
nothing to do with the basic right of home protection and self-defense found by
the Supreme Court in 2008.
A Democratic senator, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, is one of the few
officials courageous enough to propose a better idea: A ban on clips that hold
more than 10 bullets, which are not needed to hunt, practice or protect oneself.
He first proposed this last year, after a gunman in Tucson used a 33-round
magazine to shoot 18 people, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords,
killing six. The shooter was tackled when he had to reload.
The ban went nowhere and will undoubtedly be laughed off by gun advocates this
year, too. In 1993, they killed a proposal by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of
New York to impose a heavy tax on handgun ammunition, especially the bullets
that expand and cause heavy tissue damage. A few years ago, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger of California signed a law requiring identification to buy
handgun ammunition and forbidding mail-order sales. A group of gun sellers sued
and won a trial-court ruling that the law was too vague. (The state attorney
general, Kamala Harris, appealed the ruling in February.)
But the gun lobby’s legal and political victories can’t obscure the facts. The
assault weapons ban didn’t clearly reduce crime, the best study of the measure
found, but allowing high-capacity magazines would “result in more shots fired,
more persons hit, and more wounds inflicted per victim than do attacks with
other firearms.” Sensible restrictions on ammunition and clips won’t eliminate
mass shootings; they may make them less likely and reduce their level of
violence.
Many politicians of both parties know this. To overcome their fear of the gun
lobby, they need only look at the faces of the victims in Aurora, Colo.
