By David Codrea
USA – -(Ammoland.com)- “Assault rifles were used in all incidents, and city officials say they are becoming the weapon of choice in certain parts of Chicago,” CBS 2 dutifully warns. All the talking point elements are there, from using a term intended to demonize semi-automatic rifles in the title and repeating it five times in the “story,” to bolstering a sense of urgency among the uninformed that something must be done.
The neighborhoods are paying the price, little children are being endangered, everyone is scared, and there’s a proliferation of such weapons. “30-plus rounds [can be] unloaded,” and they’re being brought in by “trunkloads” from states with “lax gun laws.”
Translation: We need to ban the guns. We need to ban the magazines. We need “universal background checks” and we need to close down the “iron pipeline.” For the children.
That fact that millions of Americans lawfully and peaceably own semi-automatic rifles goes unstated. Their rights are to be defined by feral misfits who are neither lawful nor peaceable, and whose violent choices make them unfit for unrestrained access to civilization.
The “assault weapon” ban has been the unholy grail of the monopoly of violence lobby ever since they figured out the original plan to go after handguns was too much too soon, and that incremental “progress” was needed. And they would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling Second Amendment advocates.
So after the 1994 Clinton ban expired, the citizen disarmament crowd needed a new way to spook the herd. Blood-dancing after “school shootings” could only go so far as someone was always pointing out the inconvenient truth of “gun free zones.” So a new and more controllable plan was devised, one that would provide plenty of exploitable horror stories to go after the guns, the magazines, and the sales. Then, in early 2009, AG Eric Holder let slip that a resurrected ban was needed to fight cartel crime in Mexico.
And the rest is (as yet unresolved) history.
For now, the noisemakers in Chicago don’t have the political juice to try another nationwide ban, at least without risks of further exposing “No Guns” deficiencies and maybe even blurring the focus onto “refugee” admissions. Barring a “perfect storm” opportunity, there’s a bit more cultural terraforming/pathway to citizenship amnesty that needs to be arranged before legislative majorities to be reached in the next decade or so can get the job done “legally”.
But expect the public to be primed, and expect the old standby “weapons of choice” deception to play a part to a new audience. And understand that the term means whatever those using it want it to mean, as one of my GUNS Magazine “Right Watch” columns from 2005 noted.
“Weapons of choice,” depending on who’s got the floor, include:
“Smith & Wesson’s .38-caliber revolver … assault weapons … Military-style assault weapons … The TEC-9 … AK-47s … nine-millimeter handguns … Junk guns … “
And in Boston, “machetes”…
Watch for the term to be increasingly used in the media to go after semi-autos.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.