opinion

The ingratitude of the NRA

The NRA can’t say I never did anything for them. Back in 2015, I offered the perfect comeback for whenever anyone questions why a private citizen might need a military-style assault rifle. (“Demagogues doubling down,” Dec. 27, 2015). “Reason not the need!” Shakespeare’s King Lear thunders when his daughters question why a retired king — dependent upon their hospitality — would need a retinue of 100 knights and squires.

Lear’s admonishment should figure in all the NRA’s TV commercials and print ads as well as their bumper stickers. It’s already the NRA’s unacknowledged mantra. With every mass shooting, we hear from gun enthusiasts proclaiming their presumptive Second-Amendment right to own any gun they want, including the civilian version of the M16, the AR-15. I’ve written it before, and I’ll write it again: Private citizens have no need for assault rifles and high-capacity magazines. They’re hardly ideal for hunting, and they’re not practical for self-defense.

I do understand, as I heard one NRA member say, that the AR-15 is “fun to fire.” As I’ve already confessed (“Goodbye to old explosive ways,” Jul. 19, 2015), I had a lot of fun with C4 plastic explosive when I was in Vietnam. (My unit lacked adult supervision.) But that was then. I would now need a federal license to buy explosives, and that is as it should be.

Along the same lines, I’m sure it’s fun to play with a “bump stock” — a device I hadn’t even heard of before Stephen Paddock used a few of them to kill 58 people and wound 546 more in Las Vegas on October 1. Soon after that senseless slaughter, we all learned that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock can simulate fully automatic fire. The cyclic rate won’t match that of an actual automatic weapon, but it’ll be fast enough. And in Las Vegas, it was the bump stock that enabled Paddock to put out enough rounds to spray what the military would call a “target-rich environment” — a tightly packed crowd of people who were hemmed in and hard-pressed to disperse. Without his bump stocks, Paddock would not have been able to rack up such a high body count.

As for the legitimate military uses of fully automatic fire, not since the Civil War have armies been so obliging as to present themselves in closed ranks before the enemy. That’s why modern armies do their best to dispel the enchantment of automatic fire.

Such was my experience in 1967, when I was in Vietnam. The Marine Corps had just transitioned from the semiautomatic M14 to the new M16. Unlike the M14, all M16s featured a selector switch, allowing for semi- or fully automatic fire.

In the M16 familiarization course I went through, we first determined our “battle sights.” We fired one round at a time, adjusting our elevation and windage settings, until we could consistently hit a target 50 yards away.

Once we had thus determined our “battle sights,” we were instructed to insert a fully loaded 20-round magazine and then to try to hit the target by firing a 20-round automatic burst. If we got two rounds on the target, we were lucky. We learned that it’s impossible to hold a rifle steady during automatic fire. Firing a 20-round burst at an enemy soldier might scare him half to death, but a well-aimed single round was much more likely to hit him and wouldn’t waste ammunition. But, as I noted above, indiscriminate quasi-automatic fire proved perfect for Paddock's purpose.

All this, of course, does beg the question of whether outlawing semiautomatic rifles, high-capacity magazines, and bump stocks would make us any safer from jihadists or run-of-the-mill deranged people. I was reminded recently that Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan used a legal 9mm pistol to kill 13 people and wound 30 more in El Paso in 2009. Yes, but think how many more he might have killed had he taken the time to buy an AR-15.

I’ve likewise been reminded that a person intent on inflicting mass casualties doesn’t need a firearm. A truck or car will suffice. True enough. But I figure I stand a better chance of getting out of the way of a rampaging driver than of a bullet.

Finally, as Lear might say, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful [group of gun lovers].” It has been nearly two years now since I first suggested “Reason not the need!” as the NRA’s official slogan, and they have yet to thank me. All of Shakespeare is in the public domain. They wouldn’t have to pay to use the line. And I’m not expecting to be paid as a consultant. I ask only that they support common-sense gun laws, including stringent background checks.

Is that asking too much?

Contact Ed Palm at majorpalm@gmail.com.