I did some shooting recently. At the gun range, the full depravity of America’s gun culture was on display. The hostile bumper stickers in the parking lot. The Official Patriotism shirts with threatening slogans and pictures of guns. The incompetent people surrounding themselves with deadly weaponry as a consumerist lifestyle. The actual guns: an incredible array of pistols, with no purpose other than killing a fellow human, and the rifles, black, lethal, military-grade machines. My instructor and fellow shooters all shared the conviction that amy limit on guns is a Socialist-Communist-Fascist police-state takeover.
But one kind of gun was entirely missing from the scene: the machine gun.
Since 1934, the United States has severely restricted ownership of machine guns. Most of the rifles on the market today, like the AR-15, are semi-automatic. One pull of the trigger fires one bullet. The same with the Sig Sauer pistol I used at the gun range: one pull, one fire.
But for more than 90 years, buying a fully-automatic gun (hold the trigger down and spray bullets) has required filing for a special permit, paying a tax, and going through a background check and fingerprinting. The reasons are obvious to everyone: rapid-fire machine guns are military weapons with no purpose or place in a civilized society.
The number of people killed by machine guns is so low, it is almost impossible to track—perhaps a dozen cases in the last few decades. The last widely-cited case is from 1988, around when Congress completely banned all sales of new machine guns. Meanwhile, 44,000 people died from guns just last year—mostly from pistols, and 55$ in suicides. None of them—none—were killed by an actual machine gun (some shooters do modify the trigger to create an amateurish fully automatic gun).
Gun control works. It works right in front of us. It has worked for 90 years.
If we introduced more small, common-sense limits on gun ownership in America, we could still go shooting, we could still own guns, but we could also cut the number of deaths and reduce the high-powered massacres that define our society now. When machine guns were limited, that did not turn America into a Communist police state. Gun safety laws work, here and everywhere.
We need the “well-regulated” part of what the Second Amendment calls a “well-regulated militia.” It’s a proven, all-American tactic.
What restrictions would you support?
https://www.thetrace.org/2025/07/gun-deaths-suicide-homicide-data-cdc/#:~:text=Newest%20CDC%20Data%20Confirms%20Gun,deaths%20in%20a%20single%20year.&text=Fatal%20shootings%20in%20the%20United,being%20finalized%20early%20next%20year.
https://smokinggun.org/police-tuskegee-university-shooting-suspect-used-glock-switch/
Good piece. I appreciate your observations on the shooting range. Somehow anecdotal info like this communicates more than statistics. One thing I am doing to displaying the flag as a democrat. Republicans don't own it. As far as gun control, of course I support all sort of sensible limitations. But I don't hold out much hope.