In Bed With Jimmy Carter

 

 

Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows – I just rolled around in the sheets and found myself in the sack with Jimmy Carter.

 

Carter, our 39^th president, usually does yeoman duty anchoring the rock bottom of the How-Bad-Can-It-Be scale I use to judge politicians. From the speech on July 15, 1979 that critics rightfully dubbed the “national malaise” speech, to hostages in Iran competing for attention with the scheduling of the White House tennis courts, Carter’s leadership style was inaction by reaction.

 

But this time he’s right about something. In an op-ed piece in the April 27 issue of The New York Times, Carter calls for a renewed ban on assault weapons. As Carter explains, he’s a gun owner, a hunter and a strong supporter of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms – just not assault weapons.

 

We once had a ten-year ban on assault weapons, passed in 1994. It quite correctly recognized that the primary design purpose of weapons like the AK-47, AR-15, Uzi and others wasn’t sport or hunting, unless your sport was hunting  people, especially cops.

 

With a lot of help from the National Rifle Association’s Boom Boom Uber Alles wing, the Bush administration was too busy looking for weapons of mass destruction to worry about weapons of more personal destruction and the assault weapons ban expired in 2004.

 

It’s a ban that needs to be revived and strengthened, but first we have to revive and strengthen the spines of Congress, which typically turn into Jell-O when they hear the rising crescendo of NRA knuckle drags at election time.

 

Congressional spines might be stiffer if NRA members urged their organization to stop taking the silly position that every common-sense regulation of firearms is part of a vast conspiracy to ban all firearms. To start, here’s an urge from one paying NRA member – me, Number 142261256.

 

Otherwise, we’re left defending the position that a Tec-9 automatic pistol with a 32-shot magazine, or a night-scoped semi-automatic rifle with a banana clip and bayonet mount is really for hunting or shooting tin cans.

 

Or maybe the rumor that Bambi and Thumper have started to shoot back is true.

 

Failing that, there’s no good reason not to revive the ban on assault weapons.  Of course, the standard NRA answer is that these laws will only prevent law-abiding citizens from owning assault weapons while criminals, being lawbreakers, will just ignore the ban.

 

And in that, they’re probably right. But if an assault weapons ban can dramatically reduce the legal market and the profits that drive it, production will fall. If production falls, overall availability will fall.

And that’s a good thing – even if Jimmy Carter and Larry Blasko did suggest it.

 

 

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