Make America Gangsters Again: Sen. Roger Marshall wants to bring back sawed-off shotguns | Opinion
Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall has given a new meaning to MAGA: Make America Gangsters Again.
When I saw that Marshall had posted on Facebook that he’s sponsoring a bill in Congress to bring back sawed-off shotguns and rifles, the first thing I wondered is whether he plans to join the Crips, or the Bloods.
I can’t imagine anybody else ever needing or wanting one.
Or maybe Marshall is just nostalgic for the Prohibition/Great Depression era, when a gangster could walk into a restaurant with a scattergun under his trench coat and turn his rivals into mobster tartare.
You know, the good old days.
The bill Marshall is arguing for is called the SHORT Act. It gets its name from the amount of thought that went into it.
Just kidding. It really stands for Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today. And Marshall appears to be totally serious.
Opines Marshall: “The SHORT Act takes a step toward rolling back nonsensical regulations that the NFA has placed upon gun owners. I challenge my colleagues to pass this legislation and join me in fully restoring and protecting our God-given Second Amendment rights.”
OK, there’s a lot to unpack here.
The first thing is that the article in which Marshall made that comment, and which he linked to on Facebook, is from the website Townhall.com.
Talk about ironic — and unintentionally hilarious.
Marshall has developed a severe allergy to town halls as of late, as he enjoys (or maybe not) the national spotlight he earned for bolting out of his own town hall meeting in Oakley on March 1.
He stalked off the stage 20 minutes early after constituents of his — some of whom drove as much as 10 hours round trip to the remote community — started demanding he address their concerns instead of giving canned responses to spoon-fed questions.
The Bonnie and Clyde connection
The NFA that Marshall references is the National Firearms Act of 1934, which established extremely strict rules that are a more-or-less de facto prohibition on civilian ownership of short shotguns and rifles. The same act covers machine guns and silencers, by the way.
It came about because those were the weapons of choice used by organized crime syndicates in big cities and deadly outlaw bands that ravaged the countryside in the early 1930s.
Probably the most famous practitioner with short-barreled shotguns and rifles was a Second Amendment patriot named Clyde. You might have heard of him. He had a girlfriend named Bonnie.
Between 1932 and 1934, the couple carried out what may be the most famous cross-country crime spree in American history, robbing countless banks, service stations and stores in the Midwest and Southwest.
Before they died in a hail of gunfire in a police ambush, they were credited with 13 murders, including nine lawmen.
Most of their killing was done with stolen rifles and shotguns, which they cut down to make them concealable.
Short shotguns and rifles are not “good” guns and have practically no legitimate civilian use.
Lacking longer barrels and chokes to create accuracy, sawed off shotguns are called scatterguns because they scatter lead across the intended target and anyone else nearby. And a deer would have to already be dead for you to get close enough to shoot one with a sawed-off rifle.
Committing close-quarters grisly murder is literally the only thing these guns are good at.
Hearteningly, the overwhelming majority of people who commented on Marshall’s Facebook post seemed to be in opposition to bringing them back.
Gun rights and wrongs
These are tough times for Roger Marshall.
We live in a state and an age where practically anyone can carry practically any firearm for practically any reason — or no reason at all — openly or concealed.
Against that backdrop, it’s getting difficult for a politician to claim that he’s more pro-Second Amendment than the next guy. About all that’s left is attempting to bring back classic weapons of murder and mayhem banned nearly a century ago.
Marshall is quoted in the Townhall story saying that gun rights “‘Shall not be infringed’ is crystal clear — and the Biden-era abuses of the Constitutionally protected rights of gun owners across the country need to be undone.”
Joe Biden’s really old. But he’s not that old.
It’s kind of hard to blame him for stuff that went down in 1934. He wasn’t even born until eight years after the National Firearms Act passed, and it was 38 years later when he was first elected to the Senate.
Since the Oakley town hall debacle, we haven’t seen a lot of Sen. Marshall, other than appearances in right-wing media and some after-the-fact reports on his interactions with small and carefully curated groups of MAGA Republicans.
Maybe the SHORT Act could help bring him out of his shell.
If he walks into his next town hall meeting with a sawed-off shotgun velcroed on his leg, it’s a good bet that nobody’s going to be asking him any more impudent questions.
