For her to have gotten to the station she has reached in life, Susan Estrich certainly is ignorant:
If Barack Obama could convince Congress to pass the biggest health-care reform since Medicare and the biggest financial reform since the Great Depression, why can't he push through a bill supported by police departments everywhere to ban assault weapons? Assault weapons are not used by sportsmen. You don't hunt deer with an assault weapon. You don't need one to protect your home.I could say something about intermediate-caliber select-fire weaponry, since everyone knows that's what assault rifles really are -- but let's be real here and not get sidetracked by semantics. What Susan Estrich is proposing to be banned here is a class of firearm that has gotten to be the hottest-selling in the country precisely because of its utility (chambered in various calibers, from .17HMR all the way up to the mighty .50BMG) for an immense variety of tasks, including, yes, hunting AND home defense. I probably shouldn't have expected Estrich to know the story of Jim Zumbo or the Algiers Point Militia, though I still don't think there was any excuse for her not to have done her research before she wrote this column.
I also thought it was funny how Estrich disputed the constitutionality of the Arizona law, considering the fact that the Supreme Court pointed out that arms "in common use" were the arms protected by the Second Amendment -- thereby making Estrich's "assault weapons ban" clearly unconstitutional. (As an aside, on one hand we have a law whose constitutionality may or may not be in question that Estrich bashes, but on the other we have a law Estrich advocates that has clearly been shown to be unconstitutional. Apparently the constitutionality of the law only matters if Estrich doesn't support it.) So it doesn't matter how many police departments support the ban. And if she wants to play THAT game, we could point out the disparity in the support of the ban between the chiefs (who are more often than not political appointees) and the rank-and-file police officers, the folks on the front lines fighting crime every day. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Susan Estrich is going to jump on board the gun ban train, but is it really too much to ask that she get any idea of what she's talking about before she puts fingers to keyboard?
(h/t David Codrea)
Oooh, favorite song EVER, at The Roadhouse, Sirius Ch. 62: "Some fools never learn, play with the fire and you're gonna get burned, it's only love when you're loved in return..."
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