“A simple device could help curb accidental gun deaths, but most firearms don’t have it,” NBC News “reported” Friday. The story opens with three anecdotes: A 13-year-old finds his father’s gun, shows it to his friend and pulls the trigger; two “former” Marines are handling a Christmas gun during a football game; a 64-year-old is cleaning his gun and pointing it toward the wall with his grandson’s friend on the other side.
The stage is set for revealing the tragedy that will result. And for setting the stage for holding manufacturers accountable to add disabling devices to their products or be held financially accountable for deaths resulting from negligent discharges.
The “solution” offered is a magazine disconnect, a device that will prevent a semiautomatic firearm from discharging a round left in the chamber after a magazine is removed. To give their case historical gravitas, the “real reporters” introduce the readers to a device patented over 100 years ago by John Moses Browning, revered as a “patron saint” by gun owners who honor the man’s innovative contributions to firearms technology and design.
It’s true that he did. It’s also true that he did not incorporate it into all of his designs, a good indicator that he recognized there are no “one size fits all” solutions for all gun owners and circumstances, and that he intended it to be a consumer choice due to pros and cons for any modification that inhibits a firearm’s ability to perform its primary task to fire. The problem with that, of course, is anti-gun governments get involved and make disabling and other devices mandatory.
Cases in point, from this correspondent in 2001:
“New Orleans Aims Lawsuit at Gun Makers,” declares the CNN.com headline. “We seek to recover damages…from the…sale of guns that are not safe,” postures the Big Easy’s mayor, Mark Morial. [Also] In their lawsuit, backed by CPHV … the chamber indicator was inadequate because the gun was not inscribed with a warning as well.
And currently, from USA Carry:
“California is the only state that requires handguns to have both a chamber load indicator and a magazine disconnect feature. California also requires that all new semi-automatic pistols be equipped with costly and not technically proven microstamping technology. Massachusetts, Maryland, and California require childproofing technology for pistols in 2024.”
And as we saw with the introduction of so-called “smart guns,” New Jersey was quick to jump on that bandwagon with “a now-repealed law that would restrict the sale of handguns … to smart guns that ‘can only be fired by an authorized or recognized user; and would take effect three years after the technology is available for retail purposes.” (Fun fact: The primary sponsor of New Jersey’s efforts was “Republican” State Senator Joseph A. Palaia, a career politician with absolutely no knowledge of firearms design who idiotically opined for the press, “I really can’t believe that it would take more than a couple of years to make a smart gun prototype. It’s a matter of putting their minds to it.” )
The NBC News hit piece — and that’s what it really is — is a thinly disguised propaganda appeal to mandate adding such disablers to all semiautos and exploiting their absence as a workaround to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), using the deceptive assertion that all it would take is adding a simple little low-cost modification. If it means saving lives, who but a gun fanatic could object?
Except they’re not just talking about making magazine disconnects the standard going forward. Look deep into their text and we find the rueful declaration, “Unlike virtually every other consumer product, firearms can’t be subject to mandatory recalls or regulated by federal product safety officials.”
What good does it do to ignore the estimated 70.1 million semiautomatic firearms, “17.7 million modern sporting rifles” (I hate that term and you should too) and “52.4 million” pistols, and only impose changes on what’s going forward, especially when the word “recall” has been clearly telegraphed? How would that work without universal registration and a mandate with penalties for noncompliance? And as an aside, if the principle established in Haynes v. United States applies (and it will), criminals, the population most inclined to be substance abusers and ignore “gun safety” rules, will be exempt because requiring their compliance would violate their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
But the prohibitionists disguised as journalists have an agenda that doesn’t need to admit any of that, as a look at their go-to guy for a legal read demonstrates:
“There are pressure points to change the industry and get them to make the product safer,” said Jonathan Lowy, founder and president of Global Action on Gun Violence, who has represented dozens of shooting victims. The federal liability shield “took away a pressure point, and that stopped some of the progress that we were seeing.”
Lowy, former Chief Counsel and VP Legal for Brady, “filed papers … under the Foreign Agents Registration Act to provide legal and consulting services to the government of Mexico and plans to work with other nations on similar efforts,” Time reported in 2022. “Lowy has already worked with the government of Mexico and lawyers in Canada to file three lawsuits against U.S. gunmakers in the last four years.” (The Mexican government argued that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) does not extend to damages caused in Mexican territory and tiled an appeal after its $10B complaint was dismissed in a Boston federal court last year).
He was just getting warmed up:
Joaquin Oliver v USA was filed in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent legal body of the Organization of American States. The lawsuit was filed by long time gun violence prevention lawyer Jonathan Lowy, president of Global Action on Gun Violence (GAGV), and Arturo Carrillo, director of the George Washington University Law School’s Civil and Human Rights Clinic, who represent the Oliver family.
They want the world to sue gunmakers. The net effect, if successful, would be to make guns so expensive that only governments and the well-off will be able to afford them.
But magazine disconnects will be just a simple, inexpensive add-on, right?
And now we come back to the anecdotes NBC News tugged at our heartstrings with, starting with the 13-year-old was the son of a cop who left his unsecured gun out. Not to “Bash the Blue” or anything, but law enforcement, which enjoys firearms exemptions denied to We the People, has higher suicide rates and are less “law-abiding” than concealed carry permit holders (and no, permitless carry does not give criminals any more of a pass than they already give themselves) . Do I really need to link to the “Only Ones” Files here? If you want to talk to me about magazine disconnects, talk to “highly trained” Lee Paige and imitators first. And don’t get me started on these idiots.
As for the Marines, there is no excuse. The same goes for the grandfather, who at his age, ought to have known better.
What NBC News is doing here by this cherry-picking is making the threat seem uniformly distributed throughout society to “justify” blanket prohibitions. Anti-gunners do the same thing with homicides, hiding the fact that “Murder isn’t a nationwide problem. It’s a problem in a small set of urban areas…”
“As for the risk posed by a seemingly unloaded weapon, industry groups and firearms experts say these accidents are relatively rare and happen only after people have violated the cardinal rules of gun safety: that all guns should be treated as if they are loaded and should never be pointed at someone the user doesn’t intend to shoot,” NBC News admits but then walks back. “Safety advocates argue it’s not realistic to expect that that will always happen.”
Which “safety advocates”? Gun-grabbers who oppose training children and discourage armed women? The same ones who offer inducements to turn in guns to “buybacks” that encourage people who don’t know the first thing about safe gun handling or making sure they’re completely unloaded to pick them up and transport them? The same ones who make excuses for willful ignorance and blame gunmakers for criminal and moronic abuse of their products by people forbidden by law to have them?
And not to minimize “If it saves one life” unless what’s being proposed won’t do that and will cause an avalanche of other problems, let’s just do some basic math.
The NBC News subhead tells us “At least 277 people have been killed since 2000 by shooters who believed the gun in their hands was unloaded because the magazine was removed.” To put it in perspective, out of the estimated 70.1 million semiautos in this country, the problem manifested itself in, well see for yourself…
For this they want to rope in 100%? Does anyone who fully understands the issue and the motivations for pushing it really believe this is about safety?
As Harvard’s Kip Viscusi has detailed, federal laws requiring “childproof” safety caps appear to have led to a documented increase in child poisonings. Lulled by the presence of the federally-approved safety device on medicine bottles, many adults have been leaving dangerous medicines within easy reach of children. Although the caps may be “childproof” to some three year old, they can never be completely childproof. The cap may be put on improperly by the consumer, or the child can simply break open the bottle, or cut through a plastic bottle with a knife.
A quote by author Douglas Adams comes to mind.
The same holds true with guns, where the greatest safety is not mechanical, but the operator’s brain. Why should those who know this be deprived of choices backed by their experience because of gun prohibitionists exploiting the laziness and incompetence of people who can’t be bothered with four simple rules? And do you think the NBC flacks would know what a tactical reload is without looking it up, and how what they’re pushing could take that choice away and cost lives at the most critical of times?
Look for this NBC News hype to get played up though, with a much wider reach than refutations like this one that will be limited to a Second Amendment readership. And not that they’ll ever answer, but there is one tangentially related question I’d like to ask them:
Don’t you people have a GM truck to blow up?
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
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