Here we go again! Just months after an election in which advocates of the right to keep and bear arms swept to victory at all levels of government, a bunch of gun-control advocates in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives have convened to pen one of the most radical federal gun-control proposals in recent memory.
The resultant bill—the “GOSAFE Act”—has it all. It has a snappy and misleading acronym for a name. It is being sold to the public based on a flagrant lie: Their proposal, its authors insist, “protects Americans’ constitutional right to own a gun.” It is sufficiently vaguely written to allow for all sorts of interpretative shenanigans. Oh, and it represents a frontal assault on the Second Amendment, as well as on the three major U.S. Supreme Court decisions that protect that unalienable right.
The bill’s co-author, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), says that his law would prohibit “inherently dangerous and unusually lethal mechanisms.” By this, he means that it would ban the most commonly owned rifle in the United States, that it would outlaw all rifles that can accept magazines, that it would interdict all standard-issue magazines (and, possibly, given how it is written, it would ban all magazines) and that it would grant the federal government unlimited authority to compile an exhaustive, perpetually updated, “pre-cleared” list of firearms that it considers acceptable for civilian sale.
Indeed, as Heinrich openly concedes, the core purpose of the “GOSAFE Act” is to empower Washington, D.C., to micromanage which types of firearms may be sold—and to do so on the assumption that the government knows better than the people what the people need for their self-defense. Were his bill to pass into law, it would effectively invert the Second Amendment, transmuting it from an unassailable right of the people into a privilege doled out by the state.
In D.C. v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment presumptively protects any firearm that is “in common use.” The GOSAFE Act proceeds as if this simply never happened.
By its plain terms, the bill would necessitate the prohibition of any firearm that is based upon the AR-15 design, forbid the sale or transfer or receipt of all semi-automatic centerfire rifles that can accept detachable magazines and proscribe an array of popular blowback-powered semi-automatic handguns.
When selling his proposal, Heinrich is fond of noting that, if his cull went into effect, there would still be other guns available on the market. But this argument was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court in 2008—and for good reason. Semi-automatic firearms with detachable magazines are extremely popular in the United States—and they have been for more than a century. Heinrich and his colleagues may not like that, but, under the U.S. Constitution, they have no power to alter it.
As for the existing supply of guns? Here we see the classic gun-control two-step. The GOSAFE Act’s advocates insist that their aim is merely to prevent future sales, and that those who already own the firearms that they wish to ban would be unaffected by the change. And yet, if one digs into the bill, one discovers that this is untrue. First, those owners would be unable to transfer their firearms to anyone outside of their “immediate family”—and, even then, only under the supervision of the FBI. That, clearly, represents a massive change to the status quo.
In addition, the bill contains funding for a “buyback program”—which, of course, is a euphemism for the government using the American people’s money to disarm them. To anyone paying attention, this ought not to be a surprise, for, despite its fluffy name and aw-shucks marketing campaign, the GOSAFE Act represents just another attempt at the mass-disarmament of the American people—and an exceedingly brazen one at that.
That these anti-gun members of Congress likely don’t have the votes to get this done now is heartening, but it is also a warning, as they are telling us precisely what they’d like to do if they regain power.
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