Stuff gun opponents shouldn’t say

1. “The Framers never intended for civilians to have military-grade weapons.”

Sorry, but that’s exactly what the Framers intended. The idea behind the Second Amendment was to provide for a civilian militia rather than a professional army. The civilian militia was supposed to be the military; therefore, logically, they would need military-grade weapons.

It’s not as though the militia were inactive unless there was a war or a rebellion. When the Republic was formed, there was no such thing as a regular, full-time police force, so the tasks of armed law enforcement fell to the militia. And in the 1790s, as historian Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz points out, those tasks largely boiled down to two thing: chasing runaway slaves (who were usually unarmed) and killing Native Americans. That is what the Second Amendment means by “the security of a free State,” and white civilians using arms against people of color under the banner of “militia” continued well into the 20th century.

Evidently BYOG was sufficient for those tasks, but not in cases of war and rebellion. In conflicts where the government called up those militia for the purpose of fighting Other People with Guns, it had to provide weapons to many of the volunteers whose personal guns weren’t suitable.

During the Civil War, we started the draft and began the transition from civilian militias to a regular army, which is what we have today.

The reason civilians don’t need “military-grade weapons” is that we no longer rely on civilian militias for our armed forces. Such reliance was the Framers’ intent, but it turned out not to be practical and hasn’t been followed for a long time.

Furthermore, we no longer rely on civilian militias for law enforcement. It’s now generally considered socially unacceptable for white civilians to go around shooting people of color; if you want to do that, you’re at least required to get through a police academy first.

A couple more problems with the term “military-grade weapons”:

• The AR-15 and its ilk are not, strictly speaking, “military-grade” because as issued, they’re not capable of fully automatic firing. (If they were, it’s possible that mass shootings would be even worse.) This distinction is vitally important to the gun lobby for some reason, even if it’s a moot point to a classroom full of dead kids. It might be worth your time to learn to substitute “deadly” for “military grade,” if only for the sake of giving gun fetishists one less opportunity to play gotcha games with you.
  
  The AR-15 is designed to look like a military weapon, which is why it’s been so successful. The most dangerous class of AR-15 users are the ones who buy it because they think it makes them look macho, so they can pretend to be part of armed forces that they’re not qualified to serve in.
  
  The use of devices to effectively convert civilian weapons to automatic fire is on the increase. The Oct. 1, 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting involved a number of rifles with bump stocks, and a device called an auto sear or “Glock switch” had been used to convert one of the handguns involved in the April 3, 2022 shootout in Sacramento, as well as guns used in earlier shootings in Fresno and Oakland.
  
  
• “Military grade” in the 1790s did in fact mean muzzle-loading, single-shot firearms like the ones used in the Revolutionary War. However, the gun lobby will inevitably point out that even in the 18th century, inventors were hard at work on repeating and “rapid-fire” guns of various kinds. One of them, Joseph Chambers, demonstrated his repeating flintlock rifle to the War Department in 1792, just after the Second Amendment was ratified, and got encouraging remarks from Thomas Jefferson — so we can’t say that “machine guns” (of a primitive kind) didn’t exist at the time, or that the Framers weren’t aware of them. But we can say with certainty that they weren’t “military grade.” Get into the fine print on the Chambers gun, the Puckle gun (both commercial failures), and others, and you’ll learn that they were either too complicated or too unreliable for military use.
  
  The Militia Acts of 1792 describe, in great detail, the firearms that militia members were expected to have: muskets, rifles, pistols. That’s it. All such weapons at the time were single-shot muzzle-loaders. There was no mention of any repeat-fire gun.
  
  The development of gun technology over the centuries is both gradual and complex, relying on a series of innovations by multiple gun makers as well as on overall improvement in manufacturing technology (i.e., the Industrial Revolution). You can debate whether the Framers did or didn’t foresee all of that, but it’s really beside the point. What’s not debatable is that 1) the Framers intended for the United States to have a civilian militia; 2) it never quite worked as they envisioned it (so perhaps they had less foresight than the gun lobby would like to attribute to them); 3) the idea has long since been abandoned; and 4) for all practical purposes the civilian militia today exists only on paper and in the gun lobby’s diseased imagination. And therefore the only rationale given in the Second Amendment for the “right to keep and bear arms” is effectively moot.
  
  If we really wanted to honor the Framers’ intentions, we’d get rid of the armed forces altogether (possibly including the reserves and the National Guard), cancel mandatory draft registration, and just see who shows up to volunteer the next time we decide to invade some hostile desert nation halfway around the world. I don’t see it happening that way. If you’re going to talk about what the Framers intended, that is the point you should be making.

2. “I support the Second Amendment, but….”

Why?

Do you want to replace the professional armed forces and law enforcement agencies with a civilian militia? No? Then you don’t support the Second Amendment. Because that’s all the Second Amendment is about (see above). It doesn’t mention hunting or self-defense.

We sound like hypocrites to the gun lobby when we say this — because they know we don’t support their interpretation of the Second. And we sound like fools to me when we say it, because any other interpretation we might apply is just as irrelevant to the actual text as the ones offered by the gun lobby.

3. “Gun deaths blah blah blah.”

It’s perfectly OK to talk about gun deaths.

It’s not perfectly OK to leave out gun injuries.

When I Google gun injuries, the top results I get … all pertain to deaths. Nonfatal gun injuries far outnumber gun deaths, but we’re not talking about them enough. Let’s start.

The CDC tracks “nonfatal gun victimizations” separately from gun homicides. In 2019 there were 45.74 such victimizations for every gun murder; in 2020 that ratio went down to 25.73 — in part because murders increased. But still. Deaths are the tip of a very large iceberg.

In Lethal Passage Erik Larson reports that no federal agency is responsible for tracking gun injuries, which is why those statistics are hard to obtain. The Consumer Product Safety Commission would seem like an obvious choice, but gun injuries were deliberately left out of its charter.

Larson notes that a 1991 study published by the General Accounting Office examined records kept by 10 major police departments for 1988 and 1989, and found that there were 532 accidental shootings, only five of which resulted in death. That means that in the cities covered by the study, there were 105 accidental injuries (some of them horrific) for every accidental gun death.

4. “Wild West blah blah blah.”

The Wild West had gun control.

The pretext used by the Earps and Doc Holliday for going after the Clantons, the McLaurys, and Billy Claiborne in the OK Corral shootout was that the latter parties had failed to check their guns when they entered Tombstone.