The Supreme Court on Monday turned away an appeal by a group of gun rights advocates seeking to overturn Maryland’s ban on assault-style rifles and high-capacity magazines under the Second Amendment.
The decision, a major win for gun safety advocates, leaves in place a ruling by the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals which ruled that the state may constitutionally prohibit sale and possession of the weapons.
The state legislation, enacted in 2013 after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, specifically targets the AR-15 – the most popular rifle in America with 20-30 million in circulation. They are legal in 41 of the 50 states.
My opinion has also shifted over time, but not quite in the way I expected. I was also very anti-gun and pro-gun control, and maybe you can make an argument that I was being naive or that I’ve succumbed to the decades-long conservative culture war, but I feel like things have gotten so bad that we can’t possibly rely on the police or the military to be able to effectively protect us in times of crisis anymore.
Seems like cops are more likely to shoot you than help you these days, and the military might be under the control of someone competent, or under the control of a fascist demagogue who replaces all the generals with incompetent yes-men, which is a huge national security threat for a disarmed populace. Also, the government using the military against it’s citizens (or non citizen residents) is definitely not off the table - no matter what pretty words the soldiers said about defending the constitution, a lot of them are in bed with the folk who want to exterminate “the enemy within”.
Maybe if we had more stability we could make a push for more restrictive gun laws, but I don’t think it’s politically feasible for either party at this point to make any such suggestion. The tragic part is that mass shootings will continue unabated until we find a way to counteract them without touching on the subject of gun control.