Why The Bullshit Matters
The Current Laws do Not Mitigate The Risk.
Reading Time: 10-15 min
There is really just one thing that makes assault rifles so dangerous. It is their ability to deliver: sustained, effective, rapid-fire. Each word there is important in different ways, but that’s it. Military-optimized assault rifles do this better than most and in more differing and challenging situations.
Sustained, effective rapid-fire is the characteristic type of fire that allows for one person kill and injure other people in numbers far out of proportion to what one person can do with other guns, and with assault rifles this is possible in most, if not all, circumstances. That is what I refer to as scalable lethality, and for that assault rifles are on a level no other gun really touches. Scalable lethality is what allows one person, even a not very skilled or well-trained person, to amplify their potential for harm to the point they can kill and injure dozens, sometimes hundreds, and in mere seconds, or minutes.
This is what makes assault rifles more dangerous, particularly in the context of mass shootings. After that it’s details, really.
How much more dangerous? How “scalable" is it? How about as much as 6 times as many people killed and injured, whenever one is used in a mass shooting. That is fact, not projection.
Any firearm that is capable of delivering that type of killing ability is more dangerous than one that does not, and military-style assault rifles are purpose-built and highly optimized for doing exactly this better than any other.
Scalable lethality is built right into these guns, it is what they exist for, and it is why they should be looked at differently than other civilian firearms.
There you go. Done.
Why the Laws Are Mostly Bullshit and Don’t Mitigate The Risks Well
This is simple as well. The laws do not effectively control weapons capable of sustained and effective rapid-fire, and they do not properly control access to the one best optimized for it: assault rifles. This includes the new ban.
Existing laws attempt to make sustained, effective rapid-fire a bit harder, or less convenient to achieve, but they come at it backwards, so they do not actually impede the physical possibility. It’s sort of like trying to protect the public from the danger of hand-grenades by saying it is perfectly okay to own them, but illegal to pull the pin. This approach has some obvious weaknesses.
As with the hand-grenade example, the “barriers” to misuse are entirely predicated on willing cooperation - which is entirely irrelevant when someone has decided to commit murder.
There are reasons for this, and for all the failings, but in the end our current gun laws are just too toothless and/or meaningless in important ways. This tends to happen with rules that fail to focus on function, and instead focus on details.
Moreover, rules that focus on isolated aspects of guns, instead of how those aspects interact and form effective systems, will also tend to be less effective for keeping us safe. Rules that also have loopholes you can drive a truck through are clearly a bit of a weak spot too.
Issues like these plague our current laws so they fail to mitigate the hazard and risk of assault rifles and their highly scalable violence, and fail to reduce the danger and potential for high-casualty mass shootings well enough.
This is Not About The "Responsible Gun Owners"
It is not, because it cannot be. And yet a common complaint from the gun lobby, heard a lot with the new ban too, is that the laws are “targeting” law-abiding and legal gun owners. That is just bullshit, but some people find it a compelling call-to-arms (no pun intended). Mostly that’s all it is, but we can address it as a point all the same. The bottom line view if often summarized like this: every gun owner is “responsible”, right up to the moment when they aren’t.
Being a “responsible” (meaning licensed and law-abiding) gun owner tells us nothing useful when it comes to predicting the potential for murder, except possibly to predict who is likely to become one - since something like 75% of mass shooters were licensed gun owners, and used legally owned and obtained firearms. So while you can say being a legal gun owner does not mean you are likely to become a mass shooter, you definitely can say that a mass shooter is very likely to be a legal gun owner.
Really, gun people just need to stop acting like a license is a badge of honour, or that it says anything much about whether or not the holder is likely to be violent. That is at best unclear, where it is not clearly the exact opposite.
“Responsible gun owners” are a known pool from which most firearm-using mass murderers emerge, but we can go one step further, and consider how many killers might be using weapons that were stolen from, or illegally sold by, “licensed” purchasers. If we consider just one step of ownership before a weapon becomes a “crime gun” then the real number of “responsibly owned” guns that end up in violence can only be higher, not lower.
The only question is how much higher? Nobody can say for sure exactly because the data isn’t well tracked.
For context though, the gun lobby has made much of the fact that the Nova Scotia shooter used illegally obtained guns. To date of this writing the chain of ownership on those remains unclear, so it not yet certain how many steps removed they were from legal ownership or exactly how he came to have them. However, what we do not hear them discussing are the 12 restricted weapons, including 4 AR15s, stolen from a "responsible gun owner", just 200km away in Aylesford, Nova Scotia, just a few months earlier . Nobody knows yet where those guns are - but that is not unusual. Thousands of firearms, including thousands of restricted weapons, are stolen or lost in Canada every year, but again: nobody knows exactly how many.
Who is “responsible" for those?
Regardless, a law that reduces access to the weapons across the board is not aimed at users - it is not aimed at anyone, and that is the point. Prohibitions on the firearms make the user, license or not, less relevant, less important to the overall danger. It’s hard to imagine it being less targeted at “responsible” anybody.
Still Need More?
Ihave elsewhere referenced the El Paso Walmart shooting, the Daytona shooting, and the Las Vegas shooting. In all three the killers used civilian assault rifles that they legally purchased and owned. None were convicted of crimes prior to the shooting. The Las Vegas Police report on the 2017 massacre is exceptionally clear on this:
"Paddock committed no crimes leading up to the October 1 mass shooting. All the weapons and ammunition he purchased, were purchased legally. This includes all the purchases Paddock made at gun stores as well as online purchases. Paddock did not commit a crime until he fired the first round into the crowd at the Las Vegas Village.” (emphasis mine)
Licensing means little or nothing in terms of preventing mass shootings. The laws, however poorly, target the acts of violence through attempts to limit the hazard and risk, not the people. The laws do not target gun owners any more than they specifically target killers - because they cannot. You cannot tell in advance which is which, or we wouldn’t have mass shootings. If licensure was any kind of security measure, as gun owners would like us to believe, registered gun owners would not be such a large, large chunk of our firearm mass murderers.
This is a larger discussion, but the point is that any law that does not severely restrict access to the functionality that makes mass murder possible will not make people much safer. It is not about the owners. Period.
What Makes Assault Rifles More Dangerous? 3 Key Things
• Capable of rapid-fire
• Detachable Magazines
• Medium (Centrefire) Cartridge
It is crucial to remember that it is the interaction of those things that create effective, sustainable, and very deadly rapid-fire, which in turn is what allows one person to rapidly kill people, and in quick succession, and over extended periods of time. Conceptually this is very much like the “fire triangle” of oxygen, fuel, and an ignition source. You must have all three together.
We cannot look at weapons that have only one or two of these functions and try to draw too many direct comparisons, or accurately assess the relative danger. Very importantly: changing one or even two factors does necessarily make a weapon somehow “safe”. Every gun is a lethal hazard, but safer? Sure. How much safer is directly proportional to how much that change impacts on the functions that allow the weapon to scale up violence. For example, some gun people would never consider a .22 calibre “rimfire” weapon to be an assault rifle simply because of the calibre. The Cascade Mall shooting left 5 dead with a .22 calibre rifle. That was not a military-style weapon in that case - the point is only that the calibre is also safer, but not safe, and there are certainly many rifles and modifications that can optimize .22 calibre weapons into effective short-range assault-type weapons.
In any case, a lot depends on which one or two things are being taken away, but again: all three together is the key. Any law looking to mitigate the hazard and risk created by assault rifles must cut through to all three things. Our laws do not.
What is the State of The Current (Relevant) Gun Laws?
• Canada prohibits owning or buying fully-automatic (selective-fire) firearms. This means nobody (basically) can buy the full military versions of assault rifles.
• We have a restriction on loading high capacity magazines into semi-automatic rifles that is supposed to limit them to 5 rounds.
• Some, but not all, assault rifles are “restricted”. This means they are registered so ownership can be tracked, which is not true of non-restricted weapons, at least not anymore. It also means they cannot be moved around and used as freely as non-restricted rifles, and they have stricter storage regulations. There is also a short extra course needed for the license (10 hours).
• A number of specific models of assault-type rifles (add other weapons) have been banned over the years. The recent ban adds many more to the prohibited list, mostly AR platform variations.
Those restrictions were not intended to stop “all gun crime”. They were intended to reduce the potential for high-casualty mass shooting events. It was specific events that have often triggered the forming or changing of these laws. For example, the 5-round magazine limit was imposed in 1991, prompted by the use of high-capacity magazines with the Ruger Mini-14 assault-type rifle during the tragic 1989 École Polytechnique massacre.
So, More Specifically,Why the Laws are Mostly Bullshit
The laws are simply not limiting the combination of core functional factors that allow for highly scalable lethality. This does not mean the laws don’t help at all, but their value is limited by their reach. They are like band-aids on a bullet wound: they do not get to root of the problem.
Claims that current laws are sufficient to manage the lethal potential are mostly either wishful thinking or misleading, at best. They are also often outright lies.
Below is a breakdown of how the functional factors line up, or do not line up, to the specific existing prohibitions.
Capable of Rapid-Fire
Many guns are fully capable of sustained, effective rapid-fire and are fully legal. Many are also highly optimized for it - like the AR platform rifle pictured above. This optimization is a distinguishing feature of assault rifles over most other semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines.
More specifically though:
Banning full-auto doesn’t protect anything significant. Full-auto is not the only dangerous kind of rapid-fire, nor even the most dangerous. Full-auto is famously inaccurate. In reality, when people are actively and actually trying to kill other people, rapid semi-automatic fire is used far more often. This fact is consistently downplayed by gun advocates, but also even moderates who just don’t understand this fact well, in order to make non-gun people think the "really" dangerous guns are already banned. They are not - just some are.
Any semi-automatic rifle is more than able to shoot fast enough for effective rapid-fire, and this is actually the more accurate, and more lethal way to shoot. Just watch a John Wick movie and you’ll get it. What matter is how effective that is (accurate, controlled, and injurious ammunition etc) as well as how long it can be readily maintained.
If full-auto is really desired though, someone can easily shoot at full-auto type speeds with almost any semi-automatic rifle, just by using tricks like bump firing or modifications like bump stocks . These kinds of modifications are illegal in many places, but are not hard to make or get really. In both cases the firing rate is so close in speed to full-auto that even police are often confused and think it’s machine-gun fire.
Bottom line: The law does not prevent the most dangerous kinds of rapid-fire at all, but even the over-hyped full-auto fire is easily reproducible with semi-automatics. Emphasizing this law, and how “real” assault rifles are already banned, is dangerously deceptive bullshit. Full-auto is a distraction, a pawn in the game played by the gun lobby.
Detachable Magazines
Bhe 5 round rule is regularly touted by the gun lobby as both an unfair restriction, and at the same time as a great stride in gun safety - so we can all just relax about it. But it is ignored just as regularly. Even then, the capacity is not the major factor people tend to think it is anyway.
High-capacity magazines are a common focus of bans, which is good, but this is probably because that is a restriction that is just a lot easier to push through. It would be very hard to go ahead and ban detachable magazines, even though this is actually what matters more, because they are so commonplace.
High-capacity magazines (typically thought of as holding 10 or more rounds) reduce the frequency of reloads. They make the logistics of carrying a lot of ammo simpler. Both are very useful for mass shooters, and can impact sustainability of rapid-fire, but it’s a red herring. Think helpful, but not necessary.
Detachable magazines are necessary. They unlock the potential to even have high capacity in the first place, and open the door to an effectively endless resupply with far less hassle. Detachability is what makes reloading massively faster and what truly make it possible to sustain effective rapid-fire.
Even if you credit the 5-round limit as being a truly significant barrier, Canadian gun owners regularly exploit loopholes to do an end-run around the 5-round limit. There are loopholes that allow “responsible" gun owners to load 10-round high capacity magazines into their assault rifles, and a great many do just that. The LAR-15 magazine is just one way it’s done, and that type of magazine is often sold out they are so popular.
It gets worse than that though - you can buy "10-10" coupled magazines, which puts two 10-round magazines together into a super fast reload option. The difference between that and a 20 round magazines is less than 1 second of switch time.
“10/10” magazines are currently available from many Canadian gun retailers
It is also often implied, or even outright stated, that higher capacity magazines are somehow not available or usable in weapons in Canada. That is completely gaslighting people. The law only limits how many rounds can be loaded, and much higher capacity magazines are not only available, they are the norm.
One the most common assault rifle magazines here are the "5/30 magazine", and these actually hold 30 rounds - but they have a small pin installed that prevents putting more than 5 rounds in them. Much higher capacity magazines are also available with 50 even 100 round capacities. That pin can be drilled out in a couple of minutes with a cheap cordless drill, unlocking the full capacity. And guess what? More than one killer has done just that.
Lack of stock is actually the bigger barrier than the rivet.
Note that in the online ad they actually show it fully loaded, and the “window” is only useful when loaded well past 5 rounds. Kinda says it all really.
In typical inverted logic though, the gun lobby sometimes argues (albeit less publicly for sure) that this vulnerability that allows the magazines capacity to be maxed out means that the law restricting magazines to 5 rounds should just be eliminated entirely. In their mind this is just an “unfair” rule that punishes lawful gun owners since criminals will ignore it anyway. Clearly public safety is just not really top of mind there.
Bottom Line: Detachable magazines are what makes it possible to dramatically ramp up the volume of fire from a semi-automatic weapon. High capacity sources like magazines or drums are an important optimization, and definitely increase the hazard and risk of firearms, but just they remain enhancements, not core functionality. Even those are not really limited effectively in Canada, and we are lied to and misled about that constantly. If you want to know a bit more about this aspect of things, PolySeSouvient has an excellent overview of how bad the bullshit about magazines really is.
Medium Cartridge
T
here are no relevant restrictions on assault rifle ammunition. Almost all modern guns use centerfires cartridges, certainly almost all assault rifles do. All, if we leave a range of .22 calibre rifles out of the debate for simplicity - but rimfire weapons have killed many people too, including in mass shootings.The importance of “medium” cartridges more specifically lies in the combination of high-lethality (force, range, penetration, etc.) with a small form factor and low-recoil. These aspects of the ammunition are key to making rapid-fire not just deadly (effective), but also highly sustainable, and this can come down to nothing more than logistics (2-3 times as much ammunition, or more, can be carried versus some of the larger and common centre fire calibres).
There is a wide range of civilian/hunting options for most calibre of assault rifles, all with varying lethality characteristics, but it is also possible — and quite legal — to buy actual military-grade assault rifle ammunition. That includes types of ammo that the US at one point hoped to ban because of its ability to pierce body armour. Yep - that stuff is off-the-shelf in Canada. The truth is that many calibres of civilian-accessible ammunition is capable of penetrating armour - and even thick steel plates:
Bottom Line: There is literally no restriction affecting the use of assault-rifle ammunition in Canada and thus no mitigation of the risk at all from this perspective. Addressing that risk is why other countries (like New Zealand or Australia) have restricted firearms by ammo type as well as weapon functionality.
Restricted vs Non-Restricted: A False Sense of Security. Mostly.
Aslight side-trip here, mostly to clear up confusion or a false sense of security that some people promote by emphasizing this particular legal status.
Canada has a few categories of firearms: non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited, none of which exactly mean the guns can’t be had, but generally they are harder to buy and sell, and rarer, as you move down that line. Prohibited is about as close to outright banned as we get - and it’s close enough for most purposes (especially if we ignore legacy exemptions). This short article gives a good overview of how this categorization works in a bit more detail.
The new assault weapon ban does not change this structure, what it does is reclassify a range of assault rifles from non-restricted and restricted status, and makes them prohibited. Some assault rifles, but not all.
The image below shows how bizarre this has become. The top rifle is non-restricted, so the least controlled. The bottom is prohibited. They fire the same ammunition from the exact same magazines and are functionally identical.
The non-restricted WK180C and the prohibited Colt Sporter AR15
To be crystal clear: that is the non-restricted category, never mind prohibited. That category includes many assault rifles, even after the ban. Just google “tactical” and "non-restricted" for a sampling of what can be bought, and nobody knows who does buy them, or how many, or where they go - or to whom they may resell them later.
Having functionally identical assault rifles in all three categories shows how pointless the restricted status really is, and also how confusing the laws have become. The gun lobby, rightly, dislikes this confusion. They, wrongly, like to blame the anti-gun movement for making “incompetent” laws, but a look at the history makes it clear the unevenness has much more to do with compromises enforced by their bullshit and maneuvering to block having any weapons prohibited at all. If the gun lobby stepped back and allowed consistent prohibition based on function it would be simple and easy, but there would be far less dangerous guns in their hands.
The important point right now is that prohibited is the most secure category, from a public safety perspective. It is the least accessible, the weapons are the hardest to buy and sell, and thus they are also the least common weapons in Canada. Anything that gets prohibited (except of course “legacy” weapons owned before that status changed) are “off the street”. This is the category assault rifle people want to keep as small as possible, and they fight hard - and dirty - on this.
But don’t confuse prohibited with restricted. Make no mistake, the gun lobby would have all firearms be non-restricted if they had their way, but sometimes the gun lobby will also overplay how stringent restricted status is, in order to convince people that it is more than “safe enough” to manage the risks of assault rifles. Again, that is if they will even go that far - most seem to prefer them all be completely non-restricted. What does “restricted” really mean? From a risk management standpoint, very, very little.
Restricted weapons can be bought all over Canada, including by mail or online. Transactions need to be approved by the RCMP, but that is a formality if you have the required restricted possession and acquisition license (called an RPAL). RPALs differ from the regular licence for non-restricted guns in a few ways.
RPALs come with more stringent background checks. How much more stringent and how much checking is done in practice is unclear, because that process is not publicly transparent, and there is no data on how it is conducted on a case-by-case basis. In theory, though, a closer check on the licensee is part of it. An RPAL also requires a short extra training program (10 hours) and written test as well.
Restricted firearms can only be used in certain places, and they have somewhat stricter storage requirements. More importantly though, the law — again, in theory— states that someone can only request a restricted license and acquire the guns for only a couple of very specific reasons. I say "in theory” because there is some more gun culture bullshitting happening there too.
In principle, the only lawful reasons to ask for and receive a restricted weapons permit are target shooting and firearm collecting, and in order to apply you must be a member of a gun club. When applying, you are claiming that you will be engaging in the active practice of target shooting, and you must be part of a gun club for that.
In practice though, you just have to pay around $50 for an online registration and you can be part of a "gun club" and never actually set foot in one, or practice, ever. It's another loophole end run. People can and do buy restricted weapons, including assault rifles, all the time and they are not really target shooters per-se, but they have to say they are to get around a weak legal hurdle that may limit approval and that restricts transportation of these guns. Laughable really.
Restricted weapons are subject to stricter transportation and storage requirements as mentioned, but some of those have also been rolled back in recent years too.
Finally, the important bit: restricted weapons are registered on a list. This means that the police know who has them, and how many. This is not true of non-restricted, which can be bought, sold, or thrown in the lake for all anybody knows. It's not legal to just sell them to whoever you want, people are supposed to ensure the buyers have a license, but nobody directly enforces it, and there is no way to know when that is happening, like we can (or should anyway) with restricted weapons.
In the end, and despite some useful confusion from the gun lobby, restricted doesn’t mean banned, and it doesn't mean out of circulation - it barely means anything from a safety vantage. Restricted status just means there is a bit more of a burden to owning those guns, and all of that also makes it harder for people to buy them and sell them illegally. That is probably the single really meaningfully value it has for general gun crime.
That’s all good, but that’s almost all it does.
Past making them harder to sell on the black market, legal status like restricted/non-restricted might impact spontaneous gun violence, and perhaps reduce the viability of gun thefts, but on average, and as best we can tell, nearly 1/2 of the thousands of gun thefts every year are restricted weapons, so apparently not. Really, all this just impacts their potential for mass murder in one minor way: sheer numbers of them around. So yeah, restricted definitely does not mean out of circulation, but it almost certainly does mean less of them in circulation, so that helps. A bit.
Yet another assault rifle that is non-restricted in Canada. Photo: Zachi Evenor
Nothing prevents an owner from using a restricted weapon illegally any more than any other law prevents someone choosing to commit any other crime, so restriction — while it can sound meaningful if you don't know much about the laws — just creates a false sense of security. It protects very little, except perhaps making them harder to sell illegally, and lowering the overall risk of being shot by a restricted weapon due to lower availability in general, but that is hard to measure. There are still lots of them around.
But in direct terms, and here the gun lobby is correct, the legal structure fails to protect us and is largely toothless. But where gun advocates would see the restricted category removed entirely, it would make more sense - if we take a factual and logical stance on the danger - to simply prohibit a great many more guns. The fact that the gun lobby do not want many (or any) guns prohibited is exactly why the restricted category came to be in the first place - it represents a hard-fought compromise, not an ideal solution.
Bottom Line: The restricted/non-restricted categorization maybe minimizes the possibility of more spontaneous violence, but that is not how mass shooters work as a rule anyway. It likely reduces the number of high-risk weapons in circulation, but how much is hard to measure, and will not help enough with assault rifles and mass shootings. It creates an illusion of safety more than the reality. It would make far more logical and safety sense to just have weapons that are legal, or not, and keep it at that.
Wrap Up
Essentially, all the laws are either easily dodged and/or fail to control access to what matters: the core functionality that makes for the most dangerous weapons. Past that, the laws are paper tigers that rely too much upon compliance to have what limiting effect they might actually have. That is unlikely to slow someone bent on mass murder.
Whatever conclusion you personally reach about banning assault rifles, after you weigh out their real hazards and risks and perceived benefits, the point remains that those hazards and the risks are real, and the logic behind the current laws is flawed: they fail to meet their own purpose. The laws need to change to do what they are intended to do, which is mitigate the risk to public safety. In order to get there we need a bullshit-free view of the facts about assault rifles, and this is where the real struggle happens.
There is a gun lobby and culture that is attempting to gaslight the public about the guns, and the laws, and many ways. Those ways vary, but all serve the same goal: to weaken public perception of risk, and creating opportunity to buy and sell very deadly weapons more freely.
Thoughts about the article? Feel free to drop me a line.