Month: August 2009

Guns and Hunting looks at some inconsistencies in the ACLU of Massachusetts position on guns and weapons.

MikeB makes a point I’m honestly surprised anti-gun people don’t make more often, namely that we constantly make the point that machine gun crime is extraordinarily rare, yet argue that gun control doesn’t work.  Shouldn’t the controls on machine guns act as an example gun controls do work?  I’m not all that convinced, but I will admit that there’s a lot of room for bias here, and little data to go on.  But I will postulate, nonetheless.

I’m not that convinced that, outside of a few high profile criminals and high profile crimes, that machine gun crime was all that normal, even at the height of prohibition era.  One could argue that since mortars aren’t common in crime, that obviously mortar control must be effective, but mortar control did not effectively exist in this country before the Gun Control Act if 1968, yet it’s obvious mortar crimes have been uncommon to nonexistent. The reason you don’t see much crime involving mortars or machine guns is because neither is that remarkably useful for furtherance of criminal activity.  Machine guns aren’t easily concealed, and the ones easily concealed aren’t easily controlled.  All machine guns, except for crew served weapons, exhaust ammunition very quickly. It’s for that reason I don’t think machine gun crime has ever been all that common among criminals, who carry their weapons mostly for self-protection against other criminals.

During the 1920s and 1930s, machine guns made headlines, because along with the automobile, were relatively new technology that law enforcment and the public didn’t have much experience with, and that notorious criminals were quick to exploit.  But if we look, notorious machine gun crime hasn’t exactly been absent from the headlines since.  During the 1980s, Miami was known as the “machine gun mecca” even though less than 1% of crimes were actually committed with machine guns.  I’m sure we all remember drive by shooting hysteria, and who can forget the North Hollywood shootout.  I think it’s pretty clear that the media focuses on dramatic and rare crime largely because it attracts eyeballs to their story, and I don’t see any reason to assume that was any less true in the early part of the 20th century than it is today.

To speculate even further, I would argue that the presence of higher quality pistols that are more practical alternatives to machine guns actually reduce the use of fully automatic weapons in crime a great deal.  The reason being that if you’re going to make makeshift firearms, the open bolt submachine gun is actually among the simplest firearms to manufacture.  See stories form the UK about submachine guns being made out of bicycle pumps.  Or stories about how easy it is to obtain automatic weapons in the UK.  It’s probably not all that much harder here, but if all you have available is either expensive or crude, you’re probably going to have more full autos coming into the mix being used by common criminals.

That’s not to say the public is going to soon be in any mood to run the experiment of lesser restrictions on fully automatic weapons, to prove my theories correct, even though I suspect you wouldn’t see much of an uptick in violent crime if allowed to proceed.  But you could be practically guaranteed the few crimes that were committed would make headlines, just as they did in the 20s and 30s when the issue first appered.  Would that end the experiment?  Hard to say.