At last week's Conservative Action Political Conference, the President again committed himself to “defending 2nd Amendment rights.” The President, the NRA, and many members of Congress seem to believe that the Supreme Court is on their side when it comes to enacting gun laws, and the Second Amendment prohibits them from regulating the sale of guns. They are mistaken.

There are reasons to oppose the ban on assault weapons, but one of them should not be that such a ban would be prohibited by the Second Amendment.

After an assault weapon was used in the Sandy Hook school massacre, the state of Connecticut passed an Assault Weapon Ban Law outlawing the sale of over 100 named firearms including automatic weapons holding more than 10 rounds. The Connecticut law went further to define any part of a firearm designed or intended to convert a firearm into an “assault weapon” as an “assault weapon.” Several states, including New York, followed Connecticut's lead. The fight to declare these laws unconstitutional and violative of the Second Amendment failed and in June 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court let those gun laws stand. Other challenges to state laws banning the sale of automatic weapons also failed.

The Supreme Court took note of these laws. When a similar law in Illinois was rejected by the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in dissent “that such weapons are legally owned and used by millions of Americans and should not be banned for the purpose of creating a sense of security.” Justice Antonin Scalia agreed with him, but the other justices did not.

In 2016, the San Francisco-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld California's law, which imposed a 10-day waiting period before a licensed weapon of any sort could be sold. The waiting period would allow officials time to run background checks to be certain that weapons would not be sold to someone prohibited from gun ownership. Again, the NRA joined in a lawsuit declaring the California law as violating the Second Amendment. Within a week after the Parkland shooting, on February 20th, the Supreme Court declined to take up the California waiting period law. Justice Thomas again dissented, bemoaning the “general failure to afford the 2nd Amendment the respect due an enumerated constitutional right.”

These recent decisions confirm the recognition that gun laws, designed to protect us, are fully compatible with the Second Amendment. It also confirms the Supreme Court's original holding in the Heller case that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited *** we think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of 'dangerous and unusual weapons.'”

When I trained in the military, the combat weapon of choice was the Garand M1. It was an automatic rifle that was capable of carrying an 8-10 round magazine. The M1 had to be aimed from the shoulder, and fired one round at a time. Too slow, too heavy, not tactically suited to modern warfare and unable to kill the enemy in large numbers. Ultimately, the military weapons of choice were derived from prototypes of the Armalite rifle (that's what the AR in AR-15 comes from). It is an excellent weapon which should be used in combat, but it should not be in the hands of civilians.

AR-15s and variants are the automatic weapons which were used in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the 2012 Aurora shooting, the 2015 San Bernardino attack, the 2016 Orlando night club attack, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, and the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. It is a weapon which has proven itself as an effective killing machine and, with adaptation as in the Las Vegas shooting, can be capable of firing more than 1,100 rounds in six minutes.

There is a story told of an experiment conducted for the purpose of determining the cause of drunkenness. Three drinks were prepared: one was vodka over ice, one was scotch over ice, and the third was bourbon over ice. All three of the drinks led to inebriation. The fact that ice was the common denominator of all three drinks led the experimenter to conclude that ice was the cause of the intoxication.

I was reminded of this apocryphal story when listening to Wayne LaPierre this week repeating the same line he uttered after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook: “Guns don't kill people, people kill people.” Following the analogy: It is true that mass murder is caused by people—but those people have easy access to automatic weapons which were built, sold, and used to kill people in great number. The fact is that drunkenness is caused by alcohol not ice. And the mass murder of innocent civilians and school children have been caused by automatic weapons.

Sen. Marco Rubio said that if someone wants to commit mass murder, he can always find a way to get an automatic weapon. I suppose the same thing can be said of opioids, but I don't think anyone would suggest that we should not attempt to stop the proliferation of those drugs simply because and addict “can always find a way” to get them. Of course there are other matters concerning guns and their use which should be considered, but none are as basic as the need to ban the sale of automatic weapons. Congress can pass those laws without doing damage to the Second Amendment and save thousands of innocent lives.

Sol Wachtler, a former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, is a distinguished adjunct professor at Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center.