Assault Rifle Ban Fails

Harry Reid ditched the assault weapons ban from the gun control bill yesterday. But gun control activists at least have this as a consolation: gun buyers have been paying up to three times the normal price for assault rifles lately for no reason. (They feared the ban, so they bought them up like hot-cakes. Now that there is no assault rifle ban, they see they have been had.) And isn’t that almost as good, having gun owners know they’ve been seriously ripped off by their gun stores, as an assault rifle ban? Because maybe that will serve as a self-enforcing de facto assault rifle ban by making gun buyers mad enough about being gypped out of so much money for no reason that they won’t buy any more guns in retaliation. (Hey, that would be an example of a “free market solution”, and as such, it could be claimed as a victory by Republicans, I guess, with them saying: “We meant for that to happen! We just didn’t want to ban them, because that always makes people want things twice as much.” {<That usually is the result of prohibitions, by the way, and it’s also the only reason so many people were buying up assault rifles after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, so the threatened assault rifle ban only made people buy more of them, and buy them when they wouldn’t have bought them otherwise, so the proposed ban was counter-productive overall, don’t you think?} And in that case, Republicans could claim to have done more to discourage assault rifle purchases than Democrats. Now wouldn’t that be an interesting, ironic, counter-intuitive political twist to see emerge from this whole thing?)