Let me lay out two caveats before the body of this blog post. I’m about to criticize some statements made to a reporter by an anti-gun activist. First off, everything I’m about to say is based on the information and statements to which I have access, and which I believe to be representative of reality. Second, I’ve tried to temper my language, but I wanted to make it abundantly clear to anyone reading this that I do not believe him to be a bad person. I’m not calling him out just because I disagree with him, I’m calling him about because I think his arguments are bad, but I don’t think he is bad. Third, please do not direct any hate or personal attacks toward anyone I mention here. That should go without saying in all instances.
I typically don’t make it a point to comment publicly on headline-making tragedies like the recent attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego, as I feel my responsibility to contribute something of value to the discourse outweighs any urge I might have to simply be heard. I this instance, I would have been perfectly content to condemn the shooting as a senseless hate crime committed by a pair of clearly deranged and thankfully incompetent teenagers…until it was used to try to justify some of California’s ridiculous gun laws. Granted, people on both sides of the gun control debate routinely use current events as anecdotal evidence to support their own positions; what I really take umbrage with in this instance is that the supporting argument is totally nonsensical.
For his May 28th piece titled “Did California’s assault weapons ban save lives in San Diego mosque attack?” (Betteridge’s law of headlines comes to mind), Andrew Dyer of KPBS interviewed two opposing activists: SDCGO’s very own Michael Schwartz and Brady Campaign policy advisor Steve Lindley. An early draft of this blog post leveled substantial criticism at Dyer’s reporting, but I respect that he was willing to subject himself to a light grilling on Gun Owners Radio, so I’ll pull my punches and focus on Lindley’s remarks. My issue with what he said isn’t that I disagree with it, although I do; it’s that he made bad-faith arguments to support his point.
Steve Lindley’s opinions are given more space than Schwartz’s and form the article’s opening, closing, and essentially its headline. His thesis is that California’s hardware bans saved lives in the ICSD shooting because the firearms the perpetrators used were rendered less effective (there’s a semantic argument to be made about distinguishing between “effectiveness” and “lethality,” but I won’t get into that here). In particular, he calls out pistol grips and magazines: “Over time it [a pistol grip] makes it easier for the shooter to have the firearm to their shoulder and in their hands. Less fatigue, and it lines up a little bit better with your eyesight. The capacity of the magazines and other features on the firearm make it more accurate and easier to use in close quarters.”
First off, the whole article is about the Ruger Mini-14 one of the two shooters used. Between them, they also had a shotgun of some kind (apparently a pump-action) and a semi-automatic pistol (to my eye, an M&P Shield). Second, I’m not sure what “other features” restricted in California make a firearm “more accurate,” but I sure would like to know so I can buy those parts! Third, the pistol grip thing is total hogwash, as anyone with a modicum of firearms knowledge knows. If a pistol grip on a long gun made that much of a difference, then traditional stocks would have gone the way of the musket many decades ago, yet they’re still popular on shotguns, which are predominantly used “in close quarters.” I suspect Mr. Lindley even knows it, but he’s made a name for himself at the California DOJ’s Bureau of Firearms enforcing the state’s bad gun laws and at Brady trying to spread them; the reputational damage he would incur by not coming up with tenuous justifications for every one of those policies would undoubtedly be immense. In other words, I’m not sure he has malicious intent in making this obvious mischaracterization, but when you’re a public-facing spokesperson for any organization, there are certain things you have to say that you might not believe.
As for the magazine ban, I can understand the reasoning, although I don’t agree with it. Assuming a lone shooter who hasn’t taken the fairly easy steps to illegally obtain standard-capacity magazines, his effective rate of fire over a prolonged period would be slightly lower due to the additional two- or three-second intervals taken to reload. I’d be happy to go into some depth about the philosophy and fact of why hardware bans are ineffective and excessively restrictive, but I don’t need to in order to refute Lindley’s point, or his point about pistol grips, or any other judgment he made about the Mini-14 the shooter used.
Lindley didn’t try to argue that one of the shooters stopping to reload gave potential victims an opportunity to fight back, he suggested an imaginary scenario in which that’s what happened in the ICSD shooting. It didn’t! Even if we uncritically accept the premise that magazine bans save lives by forcing mass shooters to reload more frequently, it didn’t matter, because the shooter in question didn’t reload. Even if we accept the premise that a pistol grip (which most Mini-14s don’t come with even when unrestricted) makes the rifle easier to hold for a prolonged period, the perpetrators weren’t active for a prolonged period. Even if you accept the premise that, say, an adjustable stock (which, again, most Mini-14s don’t come with) makes a rifle so much more maneuverable in confined spaces, the theoretical limitation of the fixed stock didn’t seem to impair that shooter in his ability to take lives. None of California’s feature restrictions did. The shooting was thankfully stopped by numerous factors, the only hardware-related one of which was the shooter with the rifle failing to clear a malfunction correctly, apparently due to inexperience.
What else stopped the perpetrators and therefore saved lives? An armed security guard protecting the Center while school was in session, who called for a lockdown and returned fire. The Brady Campaign has a generally negative view toward lockdown drills and armed security personnel protecting schools, and supports duty-to-retreat. I challenge Mr. Lindley or anyone who agrees with his thesis to describe how the ICSD shooting might have transpired if his organization had its way: no armed security guard, no lockdown training in place, and less legal justification to use lethal force against the shooters. Did California’s “assault weapon” ban save lives in the San Diego mosque attack? No. Policies the pro-2A side supports did.
