Democrat: Outlawing Common Guns "Is the Point"

And the point of outlawing common guns is civilian disarmament

Last week, during debate in the House Judiciary Committee over H.R. 1808, introduced by Rep. David Cicilline (Democrat, Rhode Island) and cosponsored by 212 other Democrats—proposing to ban the sale of firearms identical to those already owned by tens of millions of Americans—Cicilline falsely claimed that a forearm brace can be used as a “bump stock” to accelerate the rate at which a handgun can be fired. Under H.R. 1808, a handgun equipped with a forearm brace would be labeled as an “assault weapon” and banned from manufacture.

No one knows for sure how many forearm brace-equipped handguns Americans own, but the number is likely in the millions and Congress has never banned forearm braces. Therefore, banning them would be unconstitutional under two decisions of the Supreme Court. In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Court ruled that firearms “in common use”—including, specifically, handguns—cannot be banned, and in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), it ruled that gun laws that are outliers in American history are constitutionally impermissible.

Banning forearm brace-equipped handguns would be unconstitutional also under the standard indicated by Justice Amy Coney Barrett in her concurring opinion in Bruen. In so many words, Justice Barrett said that the Second Amendment means what the Framers of the Bill of Rights intended it to mean. And by that standard, it would be unconstitutional to ban any firearm that is useful for purposes that were lawful in the founding era, thus within what the Framers understood as the scope of the right to keep and bear arms.

Additionally, Cicilline was wrong about forearm braces. A forearm brace is a device that allows a large handgun to be attached to the forearm of a handicapped person—specifically someone who has only one hand.

Rep. Thomas Massie (Republican, Kentucky) explained to Cicilline his mistake, but the Democrat wouldn’t relent. Then, another know-nothing Democrat, Rep. Lucia McBath of Georgia, insisted that Cicilline was correct. Echoes of 2007, when Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (Democrat, New York), who had introduced H.R. 1022, from which Cicilline’s bill is derived, claimed incoherently that a barrel shroud is “the shoulder thing that goes up.”

Rep. Massie explained that a bump stock can accelerate a rifle’s rate of fire by allowing the rifle to recoil rearward and reciprocate forward within the bump stock every time a shot is fired. But with a handgun equipped with a forearm brace, there is no such reciprocation. Everything is attached together rigidly.

H.R. 1808 Would Ban Other Handguns Too

If Elon Musk had a dollar for every semi-automatic pistol privately owned in the United States, he might have enough money to buy Twitter. But under H.R. 1808, all semi-automatic pistols like the one shown above would be defined as “assault weapons,” and they and the ammunition magazines they use would be banned from manufacture.

The bill would also ban the manufacture of rifles that were banned from manufacture by the so-called “assault weapon ban” of 1994-2004, such as this one . . .

. . . and rifles that the 1994-2004 law didn’t ban, such as this one.

Americans own an estimated 24 million AR-15s and comparable rifles, along with a much larger number of semi-automatic pistols, so H.R. 1808 would ban the manufacture of arguably the most common guns in America. When Rep. Dan Bishop (Republican, North Carolina) called attention to that fact during the committee debate, the Democrat chairman of the committee, Jerrold Nadler of New York, said “that’s the point of the bill.”

Nadler’s statement not only lays bare the Democrats’ civilian disarmament goal, it illustrates one of the reasons it’s important to vote straight ticket Republican, even if sometimes for a less than perfect Republican, because the majority party in the House and Senate, in addition to electing the Speaker of the House and Senate Majority Leader, holds the chairmanships of all of the legislative committees.

© 2022 Mark Overstreet