January 19th, 2013

The Facts About Assault Weapons and Crime

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Below are sample excerpts from this recent article by John Lott - available in full on The Wall Street Journal web site - where you can read the entire piece.


By John R. Lott Jr, January 17th, 2013

Warning about "weapons designed for the theater of war," President Obama on Wednesday called for immediate action on a new Federal Assault Weapons Ban. He said that "more of our fellow Americans might still be alive" if the original assault weapons ban, passed in 1994, had not expired in 2004. Last month, in the wake of the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) promised to introduce an updated version of the ban. She too warned of the threat posed by "military weapons." .....

Yes, the Bushmaster and the AK-47 are "military-style weapons." But the key word is "style" -- they are similar to military guns in their cosmetics, not in the way they operate. The guns covered by the original were not the fully automatic machine guns used by the military, but semiautomatic versions of those guns. .....

If we finally want to deal seriously with multiple-victim public shootings, it's time that we acknowledge a common feature of these attacks: With just a single exception, the attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has occurred in a place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms. Had some citizens been armed, they might have been able to stop the killings before the police got to the scene. In the Newtown attack, it took police 20 minutes to arrive at the school after the first calls for help. .....

The Bushmaster, like any gun, is indeed very dangerous, but it is not a weapon "designed for the theater of war." Banning assault weapons will not make Americans safer.

(A version of this article appeared January 18, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Facts About Assault Weapons and Crime.)

Refer to the "Sandy Hook Index" for an archive collection of material we have shown since the tragic events at the Newtown Elementary School. Most is directly resulting from the event but also there are items simply clarifying various aspects of the "gun control" issue.


Yours in Freedom, The Liberty Crew at JPFO
Protecting you by creating solutions to destroy "gun control"
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