As millions of firearms owners looked to the 20k+ thousands of Virginians who showed up, peacefully assembled, and petitioned their government to protest against further infringement of their Second Amendment Rights, we all have sat back and looked at how one bad bill is pushed forward is followed by another. A Nebraska Senator – Senator John S. McCollister (R?) – has slyly been working to do the same in Nebraska.
Sen. McCollister has introduced Legislative Bill 816 (LB816), “a bill for an act relating to public health and welfare … to provide for dissemination of information regarding firearm safety and suicide prevention and require suicide prevention training; to require a certificate and provide for other restrictions on transfers of certain firearms as prescribed ….”
Does that sound like Virginia yet? If not, read on.
What, exactly, is Sen. McCollister proposing in the name of public health and welfare, suicide prevention and firearm safety?
You might be surprised to learn that Sen. McCollister would like to make it more expensive and difficult for law-abiding citizens to obtain semiautomatic shotguns and rifles with the following features (among others): barrel shrouds, belt-fed firearms, detachable magazines, pistol grips, forward grips, collapsible stocks and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns with an overall length of less than 30”. Sen. McCollister is also apparently attempting to reduce the number of suicides committed with grenade and rocket launchers.
If the intellectual dishonesty of Sen. McCollister’s proposed legislation hasn’t raised red flags for you yet, his Virginia/Bloomberg-like approach to restricting the rights of law-abiding citizens should.
Don’t worry, Sen. McCollister really does care about suicide prevention. At the bottom of the eighth page of his proposed legislation, he slips in a little section about requiring suicide prevention materials to be distributed along with the newly required firearms purchase certificate. If this thinly disguised attempt at Second Amendment infringement wasn’t insulting enough already, the senator would have you believe that restricting access to firearms with barrel shrouds, pistol grips, detachable magazines and collapsible stocks will somehow have a significant impact on reducing suicides.
For the record, between 2013 and 2017, 600 people in Nebraska died by gun-related suicide. That’s a number that virtually everyone would like to see reduced to zero.
With that said, let’s think logically for a moment. Will limiting access to grenade and rocket launchers and firearms with barrel shrouds, pistol grips, detachable magazines and telescoping stocks by means of requiring a certificate for their purchase reduce the number of gun-related suicides? No, these are merely the traits that some anti-Second Amendment “thinker” (Art Agnos) assigned to so-called “assault weapons” in an attempt to vilify them as weapons only used to “shoot people.”
Josh Sugarmann, a gun-control activist, popularized the term “assault weapons” in 1988, writing the following, “Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.”
Since Sugarmann’s popularization of the term and its use to create confusion that would support anti-Second Amendment legislation, any number of other individuals have seized upon the term to further gun control – perhaps most famously Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) who admitted that she did not know what a barrel shroud was and then improvised a definition of, “the shoulder thing that goes up,” on the spot. Congresswoman McCarthy cemented her ignorance in support of an “assault weapons” ban bill that she did not even understand.
Now, Nebraskans face copy-and-paste “Everytown” legislation seeking to make our access to these scary-looking, but no more deadly, firearms more difficult. Why? Sen. McCollister would have you believe that doing so will reduce the number of gun-related suicides. While this legislation isn’t quite as far-reaching as what has been proposed in Virginia, it is another step down a very slippery slope. We all know what is at the bottom of that slope and it isn’t reduced suicide rates.
Nebraska firearm owner, what will you do to prevent another Virginia?
Show up to the hearing February 21st at the Judiciary Committee hearing in room 1113 at the State Capitol
---NFOA Communications Committee
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