The Minnesota state Senate has approved a sweeping violence prevention bill taken up after a violent year that saw the shooting deaths of two Minneapolis schoolchildren and the assassination of House DFL Leader Melissa Hortman and her husband.
The wide-ranging bill includes a ban on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, expanded requirements for the safe storage of firearms, and more funding for school security and mental health care.
“Today is really, really historic,” said Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, a long-time advocate of gun control legislation at the Capitol. “It stands on the work of the legislators that came before us.”
The bill cleared the Democrat-controlled Senate by a single vote, 34 to 33, with all Democrats voting for the bill and all Republicans voting against. It also marks a rare bright spot for DFL Gov. Tim Walz, who threw his energy into violence prevention efforts after the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in August, only to see Republicans rebuff him and his influence wane in his administration’s final year.
Republicans will also almost certainly block the measure’s most controversial provisions in the tied House, where they control the speaker’s gavel. Even attempts to address less contentious policy points, like school security and mental health care, have stalled in the House.
“I’m very excited today that there’s some really good work being done around gun safety,” Walz told reporters this morning before the vote. “But I’m also a realist.”
A spokeswoman for GOP House Speaker Lisa Demuth did not immediately provide comment on the Senate bill’s passage. Demuth has previously expressed skepticism about the gun control measures pushed by Democrats.
“This is not going to bring these kids back and that’s all these families want,” she told the Minnesota Star Tribune last month.
So, “assault rifle” is kind a colloquial term. It’s not an actual military category or designation as far as I know. But in a military context the type of gun that people commonly call an assault rifle is a type of light machine gun which shoots what’s called an “intermediate round.” That’s a smaller caliber or lower power rifle round that is spicier and has a longer range than the pistol rounds that sub-machine guns shoot, but which are less spicy and easier to control than the bigger .30 caliber rifle rounds that regular full size machine guns shoot. It sort of splits the difference between two types of weapon to hopefully be more effective in a broader range of circumstances. AR platform rifles like M-16s and M-4s shoot a spiced up .22 caliber rifle round (.223 Remington/5.56 NATO), and AK platform rifles shoot a toned down .30 caliber rifle round with a shortened casing (7.62X39mm aka 7.62 Soviet).
The military version of these rifles are actual fully automatic machine guns, meaning that when on the full auto setting when you pull the trigger they will keep firing bullets until you let off the trigger again. That full-auto capability is pretty much the entire “assault” part of an assault rifle. And it’s kind of the difference between military rifles and any other rifle. And even though they look virtually identical, the civilian versions of the same rifles are not capable of doing that. They’re just regular semi-automatic rifles, which means they automatically re-cock themselves after each shot so you don’t have cycle the gun’s action manually, but each shot still requires a separate trigger pull. You can’t just spray bullets like an action movie. They work the same as any traditional wooden-stock semi-auto hunting rifle that you’d use for hunting deer or elk.
They’re not. In terms of power and effective range they’re pretty thoroughly outclassed by your average deer rifle. It’s why they’re so hard to ban. .223 Remington/5.56 NATO is one of the smallest center-fire rifle cartridges that’s commonly available. If you banned every rifle that shot a larger or more powerful round you’d flat-out be banning most rifles, including the one grandpa goes hunting with every year. Since there aren’t many legislators who are willing to try to take away PopPop’s hunting rifle, most bans focus on cosmetic things like pistol grips or adjustable stocks instead of the actual capability of the gun. It all pretty much just comes down to vibes. Regardless of any evidence, people who have little or no firearms experience tend to just sort of assume “assault” rifles still must somehow be deadlier. Otherwise why would soldiers out fighting a war have the one and not the other, right? Plus, for most people, their entire knowledge of firearms comes from Hollywood movies and police procedurals, which means whatever they know about guns that isn’t flat out wrong is probably wildly exaggerated. They’ve spent their whole lives watching guys on their TV with M-16s take down helicopters and blow up trucks just by shooting at them. On some gut level they feel like there must be some truth to it, and it’s very difficult to convince them otherwise when they don’t have any first-hand experience.