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Thursday, November 20, 2003
Fox News on how candidates are confused about the assault weapons gun ban:
Tuesday, Vermont Gov. Howard Dean explained his support for extending the assault weapons ban next year because “deer hunters don't need to have assault weapons.” Gen. Wesley Clark says: “I like to hunt. I have grown up with guns all my life, but people who like assault weapons should join the United States Army, we have them.” Sen. John Kerry offered, “I never contemplated hunting deer or anything else with an AK-47.”
Clearly what worries these senators is that people and not deer will be “hunted” with these guns. As Sen. Carl Levin noted early this year, allowing the ban to expire will “inevitably lead to a rise in gun crimes.” Ratcheting up the fear factor to an entirely new level, Sen. Chuck Schumer claims the ban is one of "the most effective measures against terrorism that we have."
The most charitable interpretation is that the ban's proponents know nothing about guns. The “assault weapon ban” conjures up images of machine guns used by the military, which are surely not very useful in hunting deer. Yet, the 1994 federal assault weapons ban had nothing to do with machine guns, only semi-automatics, which fire one bullet per pull of the trigger. The firing mechanisms in semi-automatic and machine guns are completely different. The entire firing mechanism of a semi-automatic gun has to be gutted and replaced to turn it into a machine gun.
Functionally, the banned semi-automatic guns are the same as other non-banned semi-automatic guns, firing the exact same bullets with the same rapidity and producing the exact same damage. The ban arbitrarily outlaws different guns based upon either their name or whether they have two or more cosmetic features, such as whether the gun could have a bayonet attached or whether the rifle might have a pistol grip. While there were no studies or scientific basis offered for making these distinctions, the different names or cosmetic features were claimed to make these guns more attractive to criminals.
Idiotic bureaucrats have NO business making policy decisions about firearms. That is painfully obvious. If you don't know the difference in a Bushmaster and a Kaleshnikov, don't assume that you know best for the rest of us. Why these cretins insist on calling a semi-automatic firearm an "assault weapon" is beyond me. Well, on second thought, demagoguery is the likely motive. Can we come to a concensus somehow that keeping FULLY automatic firearms off the streets is, perhaps, not such a bad idea, but the current legislation is just wrongheaded and uninformed? At some point, common sense has to prevail over rhetoric.Labels: Archives_2003
.: posted by
Dave
11:06 AM
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