Fact-free gun legislation
One of the major issues we are seeing in gun legislation today is the utter lack of knowledge legislators have regarding the bills they are putting forth. More recently, this ignorance of how guns operate has cropped up with Senate Bill 6, which is being advertised as a magazine capacity limit bill. There are troves of studies showing that magazine capacity limits do not reduce gun crime, and criminals certainly don’t look up local gun laws before committing a crime. To see this, look no further than Chicago, which has one of the lowest magazine capacity limits yet was named the city with the highest murder rate in the country in 2020.
Our legislators and attorney general implied in a committee meeting that magazine capacity limits stop mass murders. If you look at mass shootings over the last few years, often these shooters use guns obtained illegally, guns with a magazine capacity higher than the law dictates, and they shoot in gun-free zones. Just this year, despite Colorado’s laws, the King Soopers shooter violated the 15-round magazine capacity law. Magazine capacity law will not stop the trajectory that other mitigating factors initiated with these individuals’ past experiences. If we truly wish to stop mass shootings, we need to look at the root cause of this behavior and look for social work programs that will stop this before the idea takes root. Looking beyond the fact that magazine capacity laws are proven ineffective, hiding inside our very own SB6 is an even more restrictive phrase, “removable base plate.” That small phrase takes this from limiting gun owners to 17 rounds of ammo, to effectively outlawing almost all firearms in Delaware, since removable base plates are necessary to clean your gun. This will instantly make a felon out of all Delaware gun owners who use their gun to protect themselves or their family.
How did the sponsoring legislators determine what specifics to add into SB6? Well, the lucky number 17 for magazine capacity was chosen by a sponsoring legislator because the gun he had just purchased happen to have 17 rounds. Representative Chukwuocha explained that the reason citizens with a concealed carry license will be exempt from this limitation was to get the support of a fellow representative. The magazine buyback would pay just $10 per magazine for up to 1500 magazines for the life of the program. In the first few months of 2021, already 20,000 background checks for gun purchases were made, so the 1500 number is another arbitrary number chosen instead of legislators looking at actual numbers. When asked whether the magazine buyback program had been floated to any members of law enforcement, they said they had not taken the time to do this. When members of the Women’s Defense Coalition of Delaware canvassed areas in northern Delaware, law enforcement officers said experience tells them those programs don’t work. A study published May 2021 by the National Bureau of Economic Research identified 339 programs across 277 cities that confirms that gun buyback programs don’t reduce gun crimes, suicides, or homicides. So, if gun buyback programs don’t work, why would a magazine buyback program work?
The reality is that people vote based on what legislators lead them to believe, not what is based in facts. That’s why many politicians don’t care about taking the time to research beyond the biased studies the specialty anti-gun groups like Bloomberg’s Mother’s Demand Action provide. They don’t have to find a program that actually reduces crime because people willing to believe what they say and don’t research themselves. We can all help stop this senseless legislation by writing to our representatives and asking them to VOTE NO on Senate Bill 6.
