Opinion
The hidden perversity behind our debate over AR-15s

By Paul Waldman and
Greg Sargent
June 1, 2022 
The Washington Post

Sen. Bill Cassidy was recently asked why ordinary Americans need to own an AR-15, and the Louisiana Republican offered a rather creative answer.

“If you talk to the people that own it,” Cassidy said, “killing feral pigs in the, whatever, the middle of Louisiana, they’ll wonder: ‘Why would you take it away from me?’”

While we would never minimize the threat posed by feral pigs, Cassidy’s answer points to a deep perversity lurking behind our gun debate. There’s a reason it’s hard for Republicans to defend the current accessibility of AR-15-style weapons: Federal law on this matter is rooted in a deeply anachronistic understanding of what rifles in America are for, and the law hasn’t come close to catching up with today’s realities.

Right now, federal law dictates that you must be 21 years old to buy a handgun from a licensed dealer. But under federal law you can buy a rifle (including an AR-15-type assault rifle) at age 18, and while a handful of states have raised that age threshold higher, most have not.

Democrats want to change federal law to implement a national requirement that buyers of rifles are 21 years old. It remains to be seen whether Republicans will support such a change.

But for now, the idea that the threshold is lower in many places for semiautomatic rifles seems completely out of step with the last few decades of cultural change in America.

Back in the 1960s, there weren’t hundreds of manufacturers turning out military-style rifles for civilian use. When the assault weapons ban passed in 1994, there were around 400,000 AR-15s in circulation, according to Zusha Elinson, a reporter who’s writing a book on the AR-15. But that ban expired in 2004, and there are now around 20 million AR-15s in circulation.

Which leaves us with the federal legal age to buy the most dangerous weapons, the ones favored by mass shooters, being lower than the age to buy handguns.

This deep disconnect has forced Republicans into contortions to defend keeping the status quo on semiautomatic rifles in place. There’s the aforementioned Sen. Cassidy line about shooting feral hogs. Then there’s the notion offered by two judges appointed by Donald Trump that 18-year-olds fought in the Revolutionary War, so today’s 18-year-olds have a right to buy what are in effect human-killing machines.

Indeed, among some Republicans, the rationale for doing little to restrict access to AR-15-style weapons seems untethered from any real-world considerations. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) recently opined that people need AR-15s to prepare for a future doomsday in which law and order breaks down entirely and police protection essentially vanishes.

Meanwhile, as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz reports, AR-15 variants have appeared in numerous GOP ads of late, and they are often brandished as little more than cultural signifiers. Assault-style weapons have taken on a kind of “own the libs” cultural life of their own: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) website recently enthused that such weaponry “TRIGGERS the Fake News Media and Democrats all across the country

Federal law seems decades behind this cultural shift. “The concept of what a long gun is in American culture has changed a lot in recent decades,” Mark Follman, the author of “Trigger Points,” a new book on mass shootings, told us.

Follman noted that the long gun was once understood as being primarily about hunting. But now, he said, rifles are increasingly marketed as a weapon of aggression and an “object of masculinity,” with a deliberate eye toward encouraging the “militarization” of gun culture.

In this sense, federal law is trapped in something of an anachronism. “The law may need to catch up with the way these weapons are perceived by 18-year-olds,” Follman said, citing massacres in Texas and Upstate New York.

There’s still another layer of perversity here. As Follman notes, mass shootings were historically carried out by semiautomatic handguns. “But that’s begun to shift in recent years,” he said. “More and more of these attacks are being carried out with AR-15s.”

“We know from case evidence that many mass shooters emulate their predecessors,” Follman continued. “The marketing of the AR-15 as the most popular rifle in America may be feeding into his problem as well.” Perhaps the law needs to catch up with this, too.

Ryan Busse, a former gun company executive who has emerged as a fierce critic of the industry, notes another absurdity: The age was set at 21 for handguns, Busse says, in part precisely because they were deemed more likely to be used by criminals against human victims than rifles would be.

“Now we have the AR-15,” Busse told us, which is the “most lethal, offensive thing out there.” Yet it isn’t treated as on a par with handguns, Busse notes, adding: “This demonstrates how behind-the-times our gun laws really are.”



Opinion by Paul WaldmanPaul Waldman is an opinion writer for the Plum Line blog. Twitter


Opinion by Greg SargentGreg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog. He joined The Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer. Twitter