Federal officials have documented a surge of assault weapons - AK-47s and their progeny - confiscated from the arsenals of gangs and other thugs. Police officers, often armed only with handguns, are finding themselves overmatched. As a result, a number of police departments have authorized their officers to meet the outlaws' firepower.
The upshot could be firefights between good guys and bad, waged with automatic weapons. This is nuts. We can't imagine that Americans want Baltimore to be like Baghdad, or Fresno to resemble Falluja.
Lest Utahns believe that this cannot happen here, we would remind them that in 2001, a parole violator shot Roosevelt Police Chief Cecil Gurr dead with an SKS assault rifle.
Some gun-control advocates blame the expiration of the federal assault weapons ban in 2004 for the uptick in the number of those weapons traced and entered in the database of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That number grew from 1,140 in 1993 to 8,547 last year, according to the Associated Press.
The AP also reported that there are an estimated 75 million such weapons in existence around the world.
Keeping them out of the hands of criminals may be impossible. Critics of the now-expired federal ban, including the National Rifle Association, said that it was so shot full of holes that it was ineffective. They have a point.
The ban outlawed 19 specific guns, plus certain combinations of military-style features, such as folding stocks and detachable magazines. (The standard AK-47 magazine carried 30 rounds; others are larger.) The old law exempted 670 hunting firearms.
But the ban was not more effective because the NRA and its allies worked hard to make sure that it wasn't.
The goal today should be a new law that goes beyond the old one. The intent should be to forbid the sale of high-velocity, military-style, semi-automatic weapons that fire many rounds in quick succession. No hunter needs that kind of killing power, unless the quarry is other human beings.
The alternative to regulation is an arms race in which police and law-abiding citizens face the choice of arming themselves with assault weapons of their own to prevent being outgunned. That may make sense in Baghdad, but we hope it doesn't come to that in Bountiful.
