Sebastian points out Josh Sugarmann trying once again to conflate pistol-gripped carbines with machine guns. It's an old story, we've already won that battle, blah-blah-blah.
But here's something I never noticed before:
Bill Clinton, the Brady Bill, the federal assault weapons "ban," Y2K, September 11th, and now, of course, Barack Obama.
Whenever I mention the AWB, I put the scorn quotes around "assault weapons", because it's a meaningless, constructed scare-phrase. Sugarmann puts 'em around "ban", presumably because of the anti-gun assumption that their ban on bayonet lugs didn't lower the murder rate because manufacturers "dodged" it by removing the bayonet lugs from their guns.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'd need to go up to the Library on the 3rd floor to get the title, but my Mom-in-law bought me a book on gun control a few years ago. The author spent a lot of time taking about sociology and all sorts of failed gun control laws, and some very small scale regulations. But the Author never once mentions the AWB, which is the largest-scale gun control effort in the last half-century...and also the biggest sham out there.
ReplyDeleteThe AWB is an "inconvenient truth"
Yup. The anti-gunners' successes have been the biggest disasters for their movement.
ReplyDeleteEven the ones that've stuck: they want to make incremental steps toward banning all defensive guns, but their very few victories basically defang their panicmongering. The NFA tightly controlled machine guns, and that removed a real boogeyman. Rightly or not, people are much more afraid of full-autos than of "normal" guns, and taking FA out of the equation left much less fear of guns in general. And the Brady background checks, insultingly unnecessary as they are, are one of our strongest tools right now. I've defanged the Brady-stoked fears of "casual" gun control believers more than once by pointing out that, whatever Brady might say about a state's "lax" gun laws, the dealers in that state are still required to run background checks.
The AWB was an even bigger failure-through-winning than usual for them. They won the PR battle by holding up scaaawy ARs and AKs in front of the cameras, leading people to believe they were FA, and and leading people to believe they were more powerful than "normal" guns... But then they had to write the _law_.
They couldn't very well say "you can't own smallish rifles that are less powerful than hunting rifles", so we got that list of arbitrary ergonomic and safety features that made a gun evil. When that's the best you can offer, of _course_ they couldn't keep their credibility.
Ya know, if it wasn't for the bedwetter's like Joshie, I would never have developed an interest in AR's.
ReplyDeleteI really, really love hearing about folks who got interested in guns (or particular kinds of guns) because of gun bans.
ReplyDeleteIt ain't enough to get me interested in black plastic rifles yet... But then, I never thought I could like black plastic pistols, and we can see where that went.