PROPOSED ASSAULT WEAPON BAN IS STILL LEGISlATION BUILT ON LIES
(2-10-2005) Last year proponents warned of mayhem and bloodshed in the streets if the federal law expired without new Maryland gun control laws in place, yet the sunset came and went without so much as a blip on the public's radar screen. Anti-gun advocacy groups still search desperately for any crime linked to the sunset, but so far no case placed under a microscope withstands any objective scrutiny.
When last year's dire predictions didn't came true, criminologists yawned and the public moved on. Proponents couldn't get their bill out of any Senate committee before; this year they can't even get a Senate sponsor.
Neil Quinter's bill introduced today is no ‘replacement for expired federal law .' Like last year, it is a vast overreach beyond that law, encompassing all semi-auto firearms. By recycling it, the sponsors advertise just how out of step they are with real public safety.
Quinter obviously intends to go down with the ship – and take his caucus with him.
| THE CLAIM: These guns “make it easy for a shooter to simply point the weapon to quickly spray a wide area with a lethal hail of bullets.” | THE TRUTH: This claim is only true in Hollywood fiction and is made now solely to scare uninformed constituents. In reality even genuine assault weapons don’t work the way anti-gunners typically portray them and such colorful imagery is even more distant from the firearms actually affected by this legislation. Contrary to bill sponsors’ claims, no firearm in the scope of this debate is a real assault weapon. An exercise in deception, the proposed ban targets firearms that share with assault weapons only their cosmetics and quality of manufacture, not their functionality. |
| THE CLAIM: “The only purpose for these guns is to kill many people as fast as possible.” | THE TRUTH: If this scare mongering were true, then we should wonder why officials routinely arm police with these firearms and exempt them from the ban. After all, why would a free society enable police to indiscriminately kill its citizens “as fast as possible”? The truth is that officials arm police with these firearms because of the guns' important role in public safety, a role is no less important for honest citizens who have every right to use robust and reliable products as their tool of their choice in defense of self and state . |
| THE CLAIM: “Assault weapons like the AK-47 or Uzi will be on the streets if we don't act.” | THE TRUTH: Real assault weapons weren't ‘on the streets' before the federal ban was enacted and they didn't go on the streets after it expired. Sale of a new assault weapon to private citizens was federally banned in 1986 by the so-called Firearm Owner Protection Act. The only such guns available now are those already in collector hands when the FOPA took effect. This ban does not sunset. In contrast, what may sunset this year is the 1994 Crime Law, that deals only with firearms having cosmetic features and construction quality of real assault weapons. As now, that bill had nothing to do with making sense; it was enacted for political gamesmanship, not substance or public safety . Firearms having the same functionality as those banned by the 1994 law have been available all along without calamity, so there is no reason to believe any sunset will suddenly pose a threat. All that will happen is that the same guns available today will be available later with a broader range of cosmetics. |
| THE CLAIM: “This bill is a simple replacement for federal law that expired last year.” | THE TRUTH: The proposed law would ban a host of high quality firearms that were never affected by the federal law in the first place. That hardly makes it a simple “replacement.” For example a broad array of semi-auto handguns never touched by the 94 law would be banned under this proposal, e.g. a gun would become a ‘copycat assault weapon' if it “can accept a detachable magazine and … a threaded barrel.” The test is not whether a gun possesses a threaded barrel, only if it is “capable of accepting” one. As a result, no Beretta handgun would be lawful for sale, and neither would nearly any of the duty handguns routinely issued to police across the state. All would become “copycat assault weapons” because of this proposal's vast grab in excess of the federal law. The same excess is true of hunting, sporting and defense long guns presently unaffected by federal law. |
| THE CLAIM: “Research shows that banning these guns reduced crime.” | THE TRUTH: In a Maryland Public Information Act request from January, 2004, we asked Delegate Neil Quinter for research to document a claim that enacting any assault weapon ban has ever reduced crime. His response contained no research reports at all much less ones supporting this claim. Either Delegate Quinter has no basis for making such a claim or he illegally withheld public documents which should have been divulged under the Public Information Act. Apparently ban proponents have no research to support their claim , and no wonder: there wasn't a problem with assault-style firearms in the first place, so it is no surprise that the research can't show an improvement. The federal ban was based not on a public safety need but political gamesmanship – just as is the present proposal. |
| THE CLAIM: “Assault characteristics on the beltway sniper's weapon enabled them to kill so many people.” | THE TRUTH: Nothing about the rifle used by snipers in the metro area uniquely enabled them to carry out their crimes. Single, aimed shots from a point of concealment are possible with any firearm. Nothing in the proposed law would address what these people did – the gun they used was stolen out of state. If anything enabled the snipers to slay as many people as they did, it was gun control. Officials were so fixated on tracking honest gun owners during the attacks that they lacked resources to answer the phone when the real snipers tried to contact them. Meanwhile, the snipers kept killing while their repeated attempts to call police failed. The final victims died as a graphic, bloody demonstration of what society suffers when officials indulge political extremism over sound public safety policy. We will all be safer when police are free to concentrate on real criminal activity instead of enforcing gun control. |
| THE CLAIM: “Honest citizens have nothing to fear from registering their guns.” | THE TRUTH: The sniper attacks give us no better example of why honest citizens should fear a government that fears our guns. The midnight knock on the door from Montgomery County Police terrorized people in sedate Jewish neighborhoods, whose residents fell under suspicion and investigation for no other reason than their appearing on state gun registration lists. In fact, the county's sniper task force has spent more money investigating gun owners since the snipers were caught than when the real terrorists were at large. |
| THE CLAIM: “1 in 5 cops are killed with an assault weapon.” | THE TRUTH: Proponents are quoting a Violence Policy Center fiction, built on inflated raw data and a false assumption that all long guns used to kill cops were assault rifles. Consider the most recent year for which data is compiled. In 2002, 133 officers nationwide died in the line of duty. Only 10 were slain by a rifle of any kind, and only a subset of those would have been an “assault rifle.” The rate at which this happens year-to-year was unaffected by the federal ban, and is far short of the “1 in 5” claim. Cops are more likely to die from being shot with their own gun than with one having assault cosmetics . For that matter, cops are even more likely to die in an auto accident or of medical malpractice. |
| THE CLAIM: “A Maryland cop was recently killed with an assault weapon.” | THE TRUTH: The only Maryland cop proponents can cite as shot with a firearm even remotely thought to be an assault style rifle was injured in 1977. He continued a career and retired from his department in 1990. His death in 2000 was cited as being from complications due to his injury 23 years earlier. This is the only example proponents use to indict the effectiveness of our existing assault weapon law – a law that was not enacted until 15 years after the man was shot. The facts of this case show how desperate are the proponents to pass a bill. |
| THE CLAIM: “This is not a confiscation proposal.” | THE TRUTH: The proposal contains a red herring “grandfathering” clause saying gunowners may keep their property if they register it by the date of enactment, but Maryland will have confiscated the equity from every affected gun in the state. Owners may never sell their firearms, give them to a spouse or bequeath them to their children. Under this law, the only thing a gunowner may do with his property is surrender it to police for destruction, an especially harsh taking from people who spent a lifetime collecting with the expectation that their hobby would support their retirement. Even worse, honest gunowners may become instant criminals any time officials add to the list of banned guns. Those who lawfully buy semiauto firearms after the date of enactment cannot meet the grandfathering provision needed to reach safe harbor with their property. They become criminals the moment officials add surprising new entries to the list of copycat guns in future years. |
| THE CLAIM: “Gunowners support reasonable gun control.” | THE TRUTH: Only anti-gunners pretending to speak for the firearm community make this claim. What does our community say when we speak for ourselves? Tired of anti-gun GOP leadership in 1998 we blindsided Senator Vernon Boozer and replaced him with a member of our community, Andy Harris. We ensured Nancy Jacobs won her Senate seat against long odds and the Machine's financial backing when Mary Louise Preis was handpicked to move up; the contrast in their House records could not be more stark. In 2002 we recoiled at the treachery of Senator Tim Ferguson on guns and ousted him in favor of David Brinkley. We took out Speaker Casper Taylor for his duplicity in enacting gun control, and backed E. J. Pipkin over Senator Walter Baker for the same reason. We played a critical role in halting a rabidly anti-gun Kennedy from becoming governor. All this and a host of down-ticket victories too, and all because of guns. Nationally, gunowners punished legislators who enacted the 1994 Crime Law, a consequence of which was flipping Congress to the GOP. Al Gore is not president today because of gun control … all facts confirmed by pundits of both major parties. That's what gunowners say about gun control when we speak for ourselves . |