It’s inevitable: a delusional nutcase commits a high-profile mass murder, and the Democrats immediately turn to gun control. For them, gun control is the default when you learn that the man who shot up a gay bar is one of the Ts in LGBTQ, so he can’t be used as a cudgel against “transphobic right-wingers,” or that the man who murdered Walmart workers was a Black schizophrenic, so he can’t be used to attack “racist right-wingers.” But if you’re a Democrat, you can always attack guns. Usually, they attack AR-15s. This time, though, Biden went further, attacking all “semi-automatic” weapons—in other words, he’s demanding the end of what millions of Americans use for self-protection.

When leftists hear “semi-automatic weapon,” they instantly imagine machine guns, endlessly spraying thousands of rounds a minute, with no stopping, as long as the shooter keeps his finger on the trigger. In fact, it’s extremely difficult for consumers to get fully automatic weapons and I’m hard-pressed to think of any mass murder on American soil since the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929 with then-legal Tommy guns.

Semi-automatic weapons are not machine guns. They require that the shooter pull the trigger for every shot fired. However, instead of having to manually rechamber a round after every shot (think of that “chik-chak” sound associated with Granny Clampett’s shotgun), a semi-automatic will automatically rechamber a round.

This speeds up the process somewhat and is definitely a convenience. Indeed, for women, who have smaller and weaker hands, both of which interfere with chambering a round manually, a semi-automatic weapon may be the difference between life and death if they’re fighting off a large, fast assailant.

Image: A woman shooting a semi-automatic pistol. YouTube screen grab.

There are lots of semi-automatics in America, although the number is a bit controversial. The NRA has estimated that number at 20% of all privately owned guns. A writer at Ammunition Depot has looked at other data and has come up with a working guess and agreed with the NRA:

The NSSF [National Shooting Sports Foundation] shows 17.7 million modern sporting rifles produced from 1990-2017. The ATF data for the same timeframe on pistols is just over 52.4 million. Those combined equal to around 70.1 million semiautomatic handguns and rifles. If that's divided by the 423 million firearms owned, the percentage comes to about 17%. When the percentages of shotguns are accounted for, plus those before the timeframe used, it looks like the NRA number is actually fairly close to accurate.

This is a lot of guns, especially because the number encompasses the type of guns that Americans use for personal protection (AR-15s and handguns). And this is what Biden wants to ban:

“I’m sick and tired of these shootings. We should have much stricter gun laws,” Biden told reporters. “Look, the idea that we’re not enforcing red-flag laws, period, just based on knowledge, not on parents saying or a loved one saying you should arrest this person now for his own sake, is ridiculous.”

“The idea — the idea we still allow semiautomatic weapons to be purchased is sick,” Biden continued. “It’s just sick. It has no, no social redeeming value. Zero. None. Not a single, solitary rationale for it except profit for the gun manufacturers.”

In other words, because two deeply disturbed men made headlines, you must lose your self-protection. More than that, you need to lose your constitutionally guaranteed self-protection. And even more specifically, given that the biggest killer in every society, always, is a government that has run amok (see, e.g., Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, North Korea, China, Cambodia, etc.), the head of our government is demanding that we lose our constitutionally guaranteed self-protection against that very government should it ever begin to run amok.