On April 25, Governor Jay Inslee signed Washington’s HB 1240, an assault weapons ban for our state. The Bill prohibits a number of firearms, but it focuses on automatic weapons. While a popular political term, “automatic” isn’t properly understood in the public eye, and is something that must be understood to reason why our gun laws are structured the way they are.

   “Automatic,” in firearm terms, means the weapon can fire multiple times without the shooter needing to mechanically operate the gun other than the trigger. This is a very broad category that encompasses two more specific groups. Fully-automatic weapons can fire continuously while the trigger is being held down, whereas semi-automatic weapons require you to release and pull the trigger again to fire another shot. Fully-automatic weapons have been banned from civilian sale since 1986 on a federal level, with specific exceptions. There is no accurate figure for how many weapons are fully or semi-automatic, as the regulatory bodies responsible for firearm oversight do not record whether a rifle or shotgun is either kind of automatic or manually operated. 

   Automatic means more than just AR-15s and AK-47s. In all likelihood, the average .22 rifle anyone would use to go target shooting with would be semi-automatic, along with most pistols, and even some hunting shotguns. Automatic firearms aren’t scary because of how powerful they are, they’re scary because of how common they are.

   That hypothetical .22 and AR-type rifles are both semi-automatic and can hold 100+ rounds. If a weapon is semi-automatic and the magazine is removable, chances are some company has made a massive drum magazine to take the thing’s capacity into the triple digits. That is just what HB 1240 aims to correct. The Bill bans magazines over 10 rounds in capacity.

   The idiosyncrasies of the Bill lie in how it regulates the guns themselves. 1240 also bans semi-automatic weapons with both a detachable magazine, and with one of a long list of features. Pistol grips, collapsing stocks, handguards, along with other features that have been associated with assault rifles. They haven’t banned all semi-automatic firearms, and they haven’t banned these features, just a semi automatic with those features. Anyone can still get a weapon that will dump out rounds as fast as they can pull the trigger, they’d just have to reload it every 10 rounds, and it can’t look like an assault rifle. Meanwhile, it’s still perfectly legal to put any of these banned features on a bolt action, pump action, or other manually operated gun, no questions asked. 

   The problem with an assault weapons ban is not that it’s violating your rights, or that it’s ineffective. It’s that the very concept of an “Assault Weapons Ban” at this point is logically incoherent unless we were to consider an unknowably large amount of guns in the United States to be assault weapons. 

   Statistics from the time of the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban show that there was a decrease in mass shootings during the time the Bill was in effect, along with a sharp recovery that leads directly to our epidemic today. Regardless of how stupid this legislation is, it has proven to have worked on a national scale. These Bills do not reduce crime, domestic violence, and murder rates overall, or prevent any other form of crime. They simply create a barrier to the scariest weapons.

   You can read the original text of the Bill here.