Smarter gun bans

A SWAT team member was recently gunned down along the Mexican border a week after making “the wrong arrest.”

The 30-year-old was found with more than 100 bullets in her body.

The horrific uptick in drug-related violence adds a new sense of urgency to curbing the situation that is now spilling into the American southwest.

An added detail: The assault weapons used by many of these cartels, while illegal in Mexico, can be bought legally in the United States. And murders evidencing that these weapons are getting into the wrong hands, as mentioned above, are showing up more and more.

Banning these assault weapons, though, is easier said than done. The previously existing assault weapon ban expired in September 2004 under the Bush administration. Its enactment in 1994 involved a sunset clause, stipulating that the ban would expire unless Congress reinstated it, which it did not.

If you’re thinking, “interesting,” you’re right.

What was the problem? Research done by pro- and anti-gun groups as well as the Justice Department found that gun manufacturers were essentially able to supply the demanded weapons simply by changing minor features of would-be illegal guns, enacting loopholes in the ban to effectively make it non-binding. Some weapons were kept on the market by simply changing their names.

In fact, the ban enacted under President Bill Clinton has been called a “sop to anti-gun liberals” by critics called out on nominally posing the image of hardball policy but having no binding effect on the issue at hand. This is a common fallacy of policy, and given the scary uptick in murder rate and other drug-related violent crimes as of late, I’d say it’s a good time to start learning from our mistakes on policy.

That being said, I’m not making the argument that we need to ban all guns. I’m making the argument that law-abiding citizens are generally not going to need to whip out the family AK-47 on any given day. Reinstating the assault weapons ban will conveniently have an insignificant effect on law-obeying people about whom we don’t need to worry when it comes to guns.

Regarding the people who do cause worry with possession of weapons – namely, drug traffickers gunning down anything that comes in their way, including law enforcement officials and civilians – it would unequivocally pose a decreased incentive to getting involved in trafficking. Theoretically (and hopefully), it would decrease the number of drug-related weapon exchanges as well as greatly decrease the number of future individuals entering the drug trade (think along the lines of how increased cigarette taxes cut back on the amount of people in our generation who pick up smoking).

The fact is, due to a highly lucrative drug trade, the market demand for these weapons clearly exists, and the disparate legality of assault weapons in America – relative to the ban on them in Mexico – is allowing that demand to be satiated to a far greater extent than what is desirable.

An assault weapons ban could help mitigate the violence, but policy writers have got to be more foresighted this time around regarding supply-side loopholes of weapons bans.