Despite the use of the term “Assault Weapon” by supporters of tougher gun laws and its consistent presence in the news, it is not a term used by almost anyone familiar with military or civilian weapon systems.
This post is a brief summary accompanied by a link to an article written by Justin Stapley for the NOQ Report, a Christian Conservative News Site. For more links as well as insights, short-posts, and general ramblings from Justin Stapley (editor and owner of The Liberty Hawk), visit The Editor’s Corner.
If there is anything more dreaded by Twitter progressives, it’s “gunsplaining” from firearm advocates on the Right. As a firearm owner and a marksman, I engage in quite a lot of this “gunsplaining” myself. While I’m sure it can come off as “I know a lot about guns, y’all” to a sometimes nauseating degree, this is nevertheless a topic that is of great importance.
One of the greatest problems in the gun debate, as it currently stands, is that those who wish to craft new gun laws and place considerable restrictions on the purchase and ownership of specific kinds of firearms know very little about the weapon systems they want to regulate. And, they often refuse vociferously to remedy their lack of knowledge.
As a student of F.A. Hayek, I agree with his assertion that, “Laws must be general, equal, and certain.” In my estimation, it is not only the duty of public servants, but of every citizen, to apply all due diligence towards understanding the full nature of proposed laws, the facts of what the laws are designed to govern, and the full impact of the laws as applied.
But demanding certainty and surety in the grounds, efficacy, and feasibility of proposed laws is not only a virtue of classical liberal governance but of progressive governing theory as well. Progressivism, if anything, is the delegation of policy to public officials from the mouths of experts and professionals. Yet, when it comes to firearm policy, it is the expertise of experts and professionals that progressives often thoroughly dismiss.
In the article linked below, that I wrote for the NOQ Report a little over a year ago, I discussed one of the most poorly constructed and applied terms in the gun debate: assault weapons. I explained why the term “assault weapon” is a constructed legal term with no meaningful definition attached to the realities of either civilian or military weapons systems.
Do you have a response to Justin’s article? Would you like to offer your own take on this topic? Feel free to submit your own article or offer a comment below.
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