How to Get a New Assault-Weapons Ban Through Congress

[SecularMotion]

CALLING the massacre in Newtown, Conn., “the worst day of my presidency,” President Obama recently told NBC’s David Gregory: “My response is, something has to work. And it is not enough for us to say, ‘This is too hard, so we’re not going to try.’ ”

Almost 20 years ago, Senator Dianne Feinstein and other lawmakers took the same approach to build a bipartisan majority in Congress, tortuously, vote by vote, for legislation banning the future manufacture and sale of assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition magazines.

As Senator Feinstein’s counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1993, I worked with her to get the assault weapons bill to President Bill Clinton’s desk. But the legislation expired in 2004 and hasn’t been renewed. Understanding what worked then is the key to doing it again in the new Congress, as Senator Feinstein has vowed to do.

Then, as now, legislation was the product of spectacular violence. On July 1, 1993, a man carrying two semiautomatic pistols equipped with high-capacity ammunition magazines and “hellfire” triggers, and another pistol, strolled off an elevator in a San Francisco building. He entered the offices of a law firm and killed eight people and injured six others before taking his own life. In the wake of that horror, Senator Feinstein asked me to review earlier bills by two other Democratic senators at the time, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona and Howard M. Metzenbaum of Ohio, and blend them with her own proposals to create meaningful new legislation that could pass Congress.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/how-to-get-a-new-assault-weapons-ban-through-congress.html?hp&_r=0

[Recursion]

1. Step 1: write one that isn't stupid

We're still working on that step.

(Hint: the gun used in Newtown was not an "assault weapon".)

[AnotherMcIntosh]

2. If the AWB (which led to the defeat of Democrats in 1994) is traceable to a shooting at a law firm

in San Francisco by a person who was so frustrated with injustice that he ended up taking the lives of some attorneys and his own life, maybe it would help to have legislation that would criminalize the unethical behavior of attorneys and law firms.

Before anyone now says that a second AWB is needed "for the children," maybe it should be asked whether the first AWB (and the loss of Democratic seats in Congress starting in 1994) prevented the Columbine High School killings.

Albert Einstein is often quoted for defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Except the 1994 comprehensive assault weapons ban was a steaming pile of shit

that banned unimportant features an did fuck-all for public safety, and still stands as a laughingstock of legalese blunders.

The weapon used at Sandy Hook Elementary was legal for sale under that 'ban'.

[spin]

4. The suggestions discussed in the article are much more reasonable ...

than what I have heard on most of the media.

If we want to reimpose a permanent assault-weapons ban and restrict high capacity ammunition magazines, let’s include a new list of exempted rifles and shotguns used for recreational shooting in a new Appendix A (updated annually) and actively solicit input from the shooting community to make it work.

If we want to require background checks for all private sales at gun shows, let’s cap the cost so that private sales aren’t prohibitively expensive. Better yet, when we do this, let’s find an efficient way to allow individual sellers to directly use the same F.B.I.-managed background check system they must now pay federally licensed gun dealers to access for them.

If, once and for all, we want to revoke the de facto exemption from consumer product safety regulation that, thanks to the N.R.A., guns have historically enjoyed, let’s bring them under the jurisdiction of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and require gun makers to build state-of-the-art gunlock technology (like palm- or fingerprint-recognition sensors) into every handgun or rifle. But then let’s also relieve gun owners of the burden of identifying and complying with a patchwork of different state laws covering the transport of firearms and permit, under federal law, the transport of any lawfully owned gun across state lines if it’s unloaded and locked in the trunk of a car, in a childproof case.

Finally, if only because it’s the fair thing to do, let’s require states and localities to process gun registration and other applications by law-abiding gun owners within a reasonable period of time, and with firm deadlines.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/how-to-get-a-new-assault-weapons-ban-through-congress.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp

That doesn't mean that I agree with all of them. For example requiring gun manufacturers to incorporate palm or fingerprint recognition sensors into firearms might be currently technologically infeasible or unreliable.