Banning Semi-Automatic Weapons Doesn’t Solve the Problem (Even If It’s a Good Idea)

After the murder of 50 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a white nationalist will not be named in this blog, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern immediately called for a new strict gun law, which will be passed next month because all of the major parties in New Zealand support it.  Also, by issuing a new interpretation of what kind of a license is required to possess a semi-automatic weapon, the New Zealand government effectively banned the possession of semi-automatic weapons right away.

Gun-control fans praised Prime Minister Ardern and asked why we can’t do that here.  I already talked about that a little bit back in July of 2014, after another summer weekend of violence in Chicago.¹

But the most important response to people who want to “solve” the problem of gun violence in the United States by outlawing semi-automatic weapons or instituting some other kind of strict gun control is: Okay, fine.  But what we do with all the semi-automatic weapons, and other guns, already out there once we outlaw semi-automatic weapons (or institute some other kind of strict gun control)?

Even a law requiring people to turn in their semi-automatic weapons, as part of a buy-back program (New Zealand is doing this), doesn’t solve the problem.  How are you going to enforce it?  What police officers are going to sign up for the task of going out and taking guns away from people who don’t want to give them up and probably have bumper stickers on their cars or trucks that say “You can take my gun when you can pry it from my cold dead hands.”

But thinking about these kinds of things is hard.  It’s much easier to just demand that we pass a law to ban semi-automatic weapons – because, after all, passing a law solves the problem.
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¹ See also “Gun Control: Get Whatever You Can” and “Guns, Law, and Aurora, Illinois.”

UPDATE (3/28/19 1:25 pm): I wanted to clarify, in case the title of this blog post was unclear, that I do think banning semi-automatic weapons would be a good idea.  And, in mass murder situations, like in Christchurch, it might help a little, though that is probably more true in New Zealand than in the United States.  The main point of my post is that banning semi-automatic weapons won’t help in dealing with things like all of the killings in Chicago, which is the main problem in the United States.  The day-after-day murders in Chicago are being committed by people with regular old guns.  But even making those kinds of guns illegal (if it were possible under the Second Amendment) wouldn’t solve the problem of all the guns already out there.  Or the fact that many of the guns out there are already illegal.  Passing another law, to make them doubly or triply illegal, isn’t going to make a difference.  But as I said in the post, making a difference is hard.  Passing a law is easy – and if it makes you feel like you’ve done something (even though you haven’t), even better.
    Also, I corrected a typo in the penultimate paragraph.