Every two-bit spy movie has its “MacGuffin”—an arbitrary, perhaps even pointless, thing that both the heroes and the villains are seeking—and, increasingly, our politics has its fair share of them as well. A host of real problems need solving in these United States, and yet, for far too many of our elected officials, those problems have taken a back seat to the pursuit of fruitless ideological conventions. Take, by way of example, the remarkable amount of time that many within Congress continue to spend on the promotion of a so-called “assault-weapons ban,” an unconstitutional idea that would be practically unenforceable, and that would, if enacted, have no effect whatsoever on crime.
In December of 2023, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) attempted to pass a law prohibiting the most-commonly owned rifles in America by means of a simple voice vote. When the endeavor failed—as it was always going to, given the makeup of this Congress—Schumer immediately took to the floor of the chamber to lambast the majority of his colleagues who had come together to block the push. “Republicans stood in the way,” Schumer said with a disappointed air, “of the Senate passing life-saving legislation to get rid of the scourge of gun violence in America.” And then? Well, then, Chuck Schumer went home.
He’ll be back, of course. He always is. Like President Biden, Schumer and his allies are keen to trot out their “assault-weapons” legislation at every possible opportunity. The details of the precipitating incident are irrelevant. They see the evil actions of some fiend on the news, and, without considering whether the event in question so much as intersects with their longstanding plans, they pull the list of coveted laws from the pockets of their suits, insist that they represent the obvious solution to the problem and cast anyone who disagrees with them as a moral monster. Thanks to the vigilance of the American public, this ploy has thus far failed. But still they try, try and try again.
It is telling—and damning—that, beyond these routine performances, Schumer and his allies seem to spend no time whatsoever contemplating the actual causes of crime. Instead, they are stuck hopelessly on repeat. At some point down the line, they became utterly convinced that all instances of evildoing in the United States could be solved if the guns that are available to the people were dramatically reduced. They have proceeded unthinkingly from that assumption ever since. Like a salesman peddling snake oil, their worldview is both simple and unfalsifiable: If we do what they want, all will be well; that all is not well is because we have not done what they want.
Which, of course, represents exactly the sort of cheap, lazy, magical thinking that one can only get away with in politics when one has a compliant media at one’s back. We know from a large number of studies that the short-lived ban on “assault weapons” that was on the books between 1994 and 2004 did nothing except restrict the unalienable liberties of the law-abiding, just as we know from recent experience that our experiments with progressive prosecutors, cashless bail and decarceration have pushed up the rates of crime. The Chuck Schumers of the world believe that if they ignore all of this in favor of uttering their heedless incantations, they will finally hit the right window and, at long last, get their own way—and thereby disarm and disempower the American people. Our job is to show how wrong they are and to vote for people who don’t treat our freedom like it is a problem that needs to be banned.
