"I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert, to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one," Dettelbach added, confirming that President Biden had put forward another entirely unqualified person to lead a powerful wing of federal bureaucracy.
This is part of the problem of "government by experts" -- Biden, who picked him, knows even less about firearms than the man himself. How could he judge the expertise of the expert, lacking himself any such expertise? So instead:
3) Since the politicians have to choose, and can't distinguish between real experts and political allies who are claiming to be experts, they'll generally choose political allies -- there's something in it for them there, at least. Appoint some nobody just because he has a degree or something and that person might do anything once in power. At least the party functionary will do what you want.4) Thus, the 'scientific and technological society' ends up not only destroying self-government in favor of government by experts, but actually fails to achieve government by experts in favor of government by factional loyalists regardless of their mental or technological capacities.
Congress' previous effort here was no better; their definition was easily dodged by simply changing one or two features to avoid making the list. Besides -- one of Ms. Smith's actually correct facts -- the real problem isn't long guns of any sort.
Mass shootings, as horrible and as frequent as they are, still only account for a small fraction of all gun violence that occurs each year. Far more people die from handguns — exactly what Americans have been stockpiling for the last three years — and the victims are usually Black and brown, people who are increasingly getting lost in the partisan battle over firearms.
Handguns account for almost all gun homicide, and illegally possessed handguns for most of that. So most of the guns being used to cause the problem are already subject to 'gun control laws.' The problem is enforcement, not more laws. If you could address the issues of felons illegally packing heat, people illegally stealing guns, and so forth, you'd have solved most of America's gun homicides.
But enforcement is just what they don't want; and therein lies the real problem.
UPDATE: The road goes on forever.
5 comments:
Despite many very good Federal gun crime laws (e.g., it is a Fed crime for a convict to possess a SINGLE BULLET), the DoJ has almost never prosecuted those, going as far back as I can remember.
Bill Barr didn't when he was a Bushie. Meese might have done a few. But since then?
Crickets.
Speaking of the NRA, they were big on that issue back in the 90s. People forget about their Project EXILE work with the Feds to get those things prosecuted.
I don't agree that Dettelbach couldn't define "assault weapon;" the very same "experts" he said could inform Congress on its definition could have informed him in preparation for this testimony. I think he flat refused to define it.
Leaving the definition carefully unformed lets Progressive-Democratic Party politicians define any weapon as an assault weapon--including bladed tools, which were humanity's first, umm, assault weapons. The goal here is to confiscate all of our weapons, nothing else. The Brits are just a step or two ahead of our Leftists.
Eric Hines
I would be interested in a digression from whatever topic is supposedly to be regulated by nominees, to address a more fundamental issue. A perhaps outmoded notion of a superficial binary understanding ...
Congress sets the clocks back and forth at whim, under the pretext of "Daylight Savings". Ask a nominee, How do you define Daylight . Is there a light spectrum or a light binary -- light and Dark or possibly Night ? If a sliver of the disc of the sun is obscured by the nautical horizon, is that the end of Day or the start of a new duration called Twilight ? Does geography matter? Is the higher horizon of mountain-adjacent territory to be treated differently from oceanfront property? Why should Congress privilege Daytime by imposing artificial clock changes so as to "save" such a thing? At common law, certain crimes were aggravated if the underlying actions were conducted at Night For instance, "Breaking and entering an inhabited dwelling under cover of darkness" (Burglary) was a different and worse crime than just trespass and robbery. What is YOUR definition of Daylight and how should it inform your regulatory authority and Congressional Laws?
J Melcher ... I assume you are being a bit socratic or maybe satiric since you seem to know that there are standardized definitions that represent the transitions to and from full daylight and full darkness. You also seem to be committing what some people are calling of late the Reverse or Inverse of the Univariate Fallacy. Simply because we don't immediately transition from full daylight to full darkness (and vice versa) or because people might have difficulty expressing a good operational definition (the appearance and disappearance of the horizon line) that they intuitively understand doesn't mean that specific conditions of Day and Night don't exist. This often comes up in claims that sexual identity is not binary because people with ambiguous genitalia (cloudy days) exist, or because male and female members of the same species often have significant overlap in general biology (twilight/first light) despite having other clear and unambiguous differences.
To pull this back to the topic at hand, the problem of defining an 'assault weapon' is that every gun that falls within the usual attempts at a definition shares several commonalities with millions of other guns. They are all magazine-fed with semi-automatic action, that is they are guns which after being discharged will automatically eject the spent case, recock the hammer, feed a round from a magazine, and chamber the round ready to be fired with another trigger pull. These are distinct from both fully automatic weapons which then drop the hammer to fire the next round and continue to cycle again as long as the bolt is free to move, and bolt or lever action which require manual actuation of the cycle. Fully automatic weapons are already heavily regulated, and manual action weapons are rarely used in criminal active. Banning magazine-fed semi-automatic guns would require confiscation of the vast majority of firearms existing the US since those weapons have been commonly produced for 100 years or more. So the definition of 'assault weapon' focuses on secondary characteristics, which winds up being much like trying to define male and female by ignoring differences in genitalia and focusing on secondary sex characteristics like presence of facial hair that have some overlap within each sex.
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