Science is a wonderful and useful thing. Using the scientific method has allowed massive leaps forward in all kinds of areas of life, and technology has managed to do incredible things like increase food production and improve standards of living for billions of people worldwide including reducing extreme poverty to what may be the lowest level in all of human history.
Hopefully, everyone agrees that those are good things.
Of course, not everyone agrees on other effects of technology such as advancements in engineering that have produced more and more powerful firearms and more and more concealable firearms. I would argue that those are good things, but, of course, not everyone agrees.
And one group that clearly doesn’t agree with me about that is a group going by the acronym CRIME: Citizen Response to Increased Muzzle Energy.
Yes, “muzzle energy.”
It would seem that their concern has to do with firepower more than anything else, so, I’m guessing that members of CRIME aren’t fans of civilians having a .50 caliber rifle for when they need to stop the person who broke in and is hiding behind the refrigerator… in their neighbor’s house.
So, CRIME submitted a brief to the Supreme Court calling for SCOTUS to limit accessibility to “assault rifles” because they have increased muzzle energy, and for that they use a “measurement” of MEpM, Muzzle Energy per Minute. They say that this “defines a firearm’s lethality and best harmonizes the cases” currently before the court.
Never mind that how lethal a firearm is has more to do with accuracy on the part of the shooter than the “muzzle energy” and that lethality isn’t a factor in the legality of a firearm. Based on the Second Amendment, the fact that it is an arm of any kind is what makes it legal (in my admittedly non-lawyer opinion).
Lethality and legality are unrelated concepts, but CRIME is putting forth their version of E=MC(squared) to try to gaslight some people into thinking that lethality is relevant at all.
It’s not.
And if you want to get even more details about the silliness that is this brief, you can watch a breakdown of it below from Washington Gun Law’s William Kirk.
