The gun control movement is built on a foundation it cannot defend

The bottom line

The gun control movement does not have a theory of crime. It has a theory of objects. That distinction explains why every major gun ban they push either collapses in court or does nothing to reduce violence, and why the logical endpoint of their argument is banning kitchen knives.

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This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.

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Not a theory of crime, a theory of objects

A British MP recently argued that not all kitchen knives need to have a point. His reasoning: kitchen knives show up in domestic stabbings, so rounded tips would cut the violence. American gun control advocates laughed at this. They should not. The argument is structurally identical to their own.

If the weapon is the problem, not the person wielding it, then every inanimate object capable of causing harm becomes a legitimate target for regulation. An AR-15 with a pistol grip is dangerous, so ban the pistol grip. A kitchen knife has a point, so round it off. A car can be driven into a crowd, so mandate speed limiters. What changes is not the object but your willingness to follow the logic to its conclusion.

I own a car. Right now I could drive it into a crowd of people. Nothing stands between me and that decision except my own character. The same is true of the AR-15 in my safe. The reason most gun owners do not commit violence is not because legislators made certain features illegal. It is because most people are not violent. That is elementary moral reasoning, and the anti-gun movement has spent decades refusing to engage with it, because engaging with it destroys the entire premise of their project.

The definitional shell game

“Assault weapon” is not a technical term. It is a legal fiction, constructed differently in every jurisdiction, designed to sound maximally alarming while sweeping in as many ordinary firearms as possible.

California defines an assault weapon as a semiautomatic centerfire rifle with a detachable magazine and any one of a specified list of features: a pistol grip, a thumbhole stock, a folding stock, a flash suppressor, a grenade launcher mount. Under that framework, an AR-15 with a thumbhole stock is banned, while a functionally identical rifle without one is legal. The thumbhole stock does not make the rifle more lethal. It makes it more comfortable to hold. The feature list tracks aesthetics, not dangerousness.

Illinois passed its Protect Illinois Communities Act in 2023 under the same feature-based theory. In November 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois issued a 168-page opinion striking it down. Judge Stephen McGlynn applied the text-and-history test the Supreme Court mandated in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen (2022) and concluded that Illinois could not demonstrate a historical tradition of prohibiting the class of weapons it was banning. The Trump DOJ filed an amicus brief opposing Illinois’s position, the first time the federal government had taken that posture in such a challenge. That case is now before the Seventh Circuit.

Washington, D.C. is fighting a DOJ lawsuit filed in December 2025 over its own assault weapons ban. The complaint describes the D.C. law as “arbitrary” and “historically ungrounded,” noting the firearms it bans are “unquestionably in common use today.” The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America, with an estimated 20 million in civilian hands. The Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was explicit: weapons in common use for lawful purposes receive constitutional protection. Banning the most commonly owned rifle in the country does not survive that standard, and courts are increasingly saying so.

Miller v. Bonta took the California ban to the federal bench. Judge Roger Benitez ruled it unconstitutional in 2023, finding the state could not produce historical analogs for a prohibition this broad. California appealed. The Ninth Circuit stayed the ruling and the case is still working through the courts. Millions of California gun owners remain subject to a law a federal judge already found unconstitutional.

The ban-then-ban-again logic

Here is a prediction I keep making that keeps coming true: every ban produces a workaround, and then the workaround gets banned.

The 1994 federal assault weapons ban had a ten-year sunset clause. When it expired in 2004, the firearms industry produced the same rifles without the cosmetic features the law targeted. Sales boomed. The University of Pennsylvania studied the ban’s effects and found no statistically significant reduction in gun murders. RAND’s review of the available research reached the same conclusion: evidence for the effect of assault weapons bans on violent crime is inconclusive. There is no serious evidentiary case that feature bans reduce homicides, because the banned features are not what makes a firearm lethal.

Lethality comes from caliber, rate of fire, and the person pulling the trigger. Banning a pistol grip or a thumbhole stock addresses none of those things. Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007 with two handguns before the first responding officer reached the building. He used no rifle. Raise that with gun control advocates and the answer shifts to handgun restrictions. Point out that revolvers are excluded from most bans and they say revolvers should be looked at next. Note that .22 LR rifles can be lethal too and some of them nod. The logic never stops because it cannot stop. There will always be something you can use to hurt another person.

What actually reduces violence

If the goal is genuinely to reduce violent crime, the policy looks nothing like feature bans. It focuses on people. The FBI’s crime data consistently shows that firearms homicides are not distributed evenly across the population of gun owners. They are concentrated among people with prior criminal records, people involved in drug or gang activity, people who obtained their guns illegally to begin with. The person who bought an AR-15 legally at a gun store is not the problem. The person using a stolen handgun in a city that has declined to prosecute prior weapons charges is.

The answer to that is swift consequences for criminal use of firearms. Federal law already prohibits felons from possessing guns. The problem is that prosecutors routinely plead away or decline to file federal firearms charges. Project Exile, the federal-state partnership that aggressively prosecuted illegal gun possession in Richmond, Virginia in the late 1990s, produced a measurable drop in gun homicides. It was never replicated at scale. Targeting actual criminals with laws already on the books is less politically satisfying than banning thumbhole stocks, so it does not get the same energy.

The anti-gun movement has no serious answer to why criminals would comply with an assault weapons ban when they ignore gun laws already. The movement does not ask that question. The goal is a world where ordinary people are not armed, and the evidence gets used selectively to support that conclusion.

When the foundation gives way

Bruen changed things at the constitutional level. Under the old framework, courts applied a means-end balancing test that gave legislatures wide latitude to restrict firearms as long as they could articulate a public safety rationale. Bruen eliminated that test. The government must now demonstrate that a challenged regulation is consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in this country at the time the Second Amendment was ratified. Feature bans on common rifles have no such historical analog. There were no 18th-century laws restricting rifle stocks or barrel threading. These regulations are a mid-20th-century invention, politically motivated, with no grounding in American legal history.

Courts are acting on this. The ATF’s pistol brace rule, which reclassified millions of legally purchased firearms as short-barreled rifles subject to NFA registration requirements, was permanently vacated. The Fifth Circuit invalidated it in Mock v. Bondi. The Eighth Circuit reached the same result in Johnson v. ATF. The DOJ dismissed its appeal in July 2025. The government tried to regulate a stabilizing brace as if it were a machine-gun conversion, and courts said no.

Ask the anti-gun movement which feature of an AR-15 makes it more lethal than the handguns they also want to ban. They cannot answer that. Ask them to name a jurisdiction that banned its way to safety. They cannot name one. So they rewrite the definitions, add more features to the banned list, push the same bill under a different name, and wait for a more favorable court.

Heller and Bruen are doing what they were designed to do. A federal judge in Illinois reviewed 168 pages of historical firearms law and found nothing to support that state’s ban. A federal judge in California did the same. The DOJ is suing D.C. over the same category of law.

When you ban the AR-15 and people switch to pistols, and then you want to ban pistols too, and the murder rate stays flat through all of it, at some point you have to confront the possibility that the weapons were never the problem. Anti-gun advocates are not there yet. They are still at the stage where rounding off the tip of a kitchen knife counts as a serious policy proposal.