I am unfamiliar with his political leanings, and the article is old, but I'll comment on it anyway, it sounds similar to much that we hear today.
An interesting hypothesis:
"the assault weapons ban will have no significant effect either on the crime rate or on personal security."
I'd like to see the statistics before and after the ban. Probably not statistically different, I bet.
He does make a valid point:
"De-escalation begins with a change in mentality. And that change in mentality starts with the symbolic yielding of certain types of weapons. The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first, and even then not for decades."
If you want to disarm a populace that is used to and relies on currently legal arms for self-defense and hunting, you have to change the mindset over time, several generations, a tiny bit at a time. Trying to pass "all-or-nothing" legislation just won't work well.
Where his argument fails, in my opinion, is comparing the US to the socialist countries of England and Canada. Their governments mostly take care of EVERYone. Half the population can stay at home entitled to food and rent assistance, the other half works to support themselves and the stay-at-home entitled. When you can sit home, play video games, watch TV, eat, and you don't have to earn it, you are 'gentled.' No need to go out and commit a crime, you can sit home, fat, dumb, and happy, with no pride and no responsibility. You want anything, just ask. If the government, for generations looking out for your best interest and telling you how to live, says that to continue your entitlement you need to give up your guns, what do you think they will do?
Although we sometimes look like we are moving towards an entitlement government, we are not, yet. We have individual rights, and we should be responsible for them. Our ancestors came from those entitlement, controlling countries to make something better. We are supposed to make our life on our own two feet. And that comes at a price.
More locally focused, a couple of things always stick in my mind what I hear someone wants to take my guns away:
Law abiding citizens are just that, law-abiding. The criminals are by definition NOT law-abiding. If the law says no guns, I, being a law-abiding citizen, will give up my guns. But the criminal, NOT law abiding, will of course not follow the law. Thus, if the criminal has access to a firearm to commit an offense against me it would be unfair, even inhumane, to take an equal opportunity away from me to defend myself.
The police do NOT protect and serve, and are protected by law from the responsibility of doing that. I do know a few cops and I am sure they would protect and defend me if they knew ahead of time that I was going to experience an armed home invasion or a street-corner mugging. But of course they don't see into the future. I also know that they cannot be in two places at once. If the police come to your house to defend you from an armed home invasion, they cannot come to my house at the same time; that just won't work in my town, with one officer on duty at any time.
And our constitution says I can have a firearm and I can bear it. The very people who thought England was too oppressive and started a new country because of that oppression wrote and approved that.
As an aside, Krauthammer's murder statistics might be correct for 1992, but more recently, according to the FBI in 2009, there were 13,636 total murders in the 50 states, of those 9,146 were by firearms, and of those 6,452 were by handguns.
Compare this to NHTSA date from 2008 - 34,172 motor vehicle deaths, of which 5,312 (more than double the 1998 count, by the way) were motorcycles.
And they want to take my guns away from me.
