Maryland Assault Weapons Ban Round Up
Md. lawmakers hear gun-ban testimony:
For state lawmakers, gun-control advocates, police commissioners and even candidates stumping for president, when it comes to the issue of banning assault weapons, 1-in-5 is the magic number.
Democratic presidential primary front-runner Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts uses the statistic. So does the Episcopal Church of America. And in Annapolis, where a Senate committee heard testimony yesterday from all sides on a proposed assault weapons ban, supporters quoted the statistic verbatim: “One in five law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty is killed with an assault weapon.”
There’s just one problem with the ratio, according to gun rights advocates: It isn’t true.
Dozens of them testified before the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee yesterday, and a hundred more crammed an antechamber while committee members considered a bill that would give Maryland one of the nation’s strictest bans on semiautomatic firearms by banning 45 named weapons and any subsequent copycats. Though 70 state senators and delegates back the bill, gun shop owners, hunting groups, and assorted police organizations rejected the ban and the statistic.
Lt. Col. Steven. T. Moyer of the Maryland State Police — which opposes prohibiting the sale, transfer and ownership of semi-automatic weapons — told committee members that of the 50 rifle-related deaths in the state over the past decade, none of them were officers.
“The statistics are not here and [don’t] support this legislation,” he said.
Roots of the 20-percent figure lie in the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit group that works to curtail gun violence through research, advocacy, education and litigation. The group analyzed unpublished FBI data on fatal police shootings from Jan. 1, 1998, through Dec. 31, 2001. During the period, 211 officers nationwide were killed in the line of duty, 41 of them with weapons the group determined to be assault weapons, such as M1 Carbines, AK-47s, Tec 9s and AR-15s.
“They classified all rifles as assault weapons,” Republican state Sen. Nancy Jacobs, wearing a button with the words “MARYLAND GUNOWNERS VOTE,” complained during the marathon hearing.
The VPC has a long history of lying through its collective teeth. Glad to see it get some media coverage. All rifles are assault weapons. So, my dad’s Remington nylon body 22 is the same as an AR15? The anti-gun folks defend their stat, which has been severely debunked in other ways.
Of course even Kevin is wrong. An insignificant number of the cops (likely zero) were killed with rifles capable of automatic fire that fire medium power cartridges, which is the real definition of assault weapon.
Join together issues a press release:
CeaseFire Maryland, the state’s leading gun violence prevention group, welcomed the results of a survey by Gonzales Research that showed seventy-seven percent of Marylanders favor state legislation banning military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and their copycats. Only 19% oppose a ban on such weapons. Leah Barrett, Executive Director of CeaseFire Maryland, said: “Marylanders have spoken clearly in favor of banning these weapons of war from our streets. I hope the Governor is listening.”
The support for a strong Maryland assault weapons ban including copycat assault weapons encompasses the majority of voters in every demographic sub-group – 68% of Republicans, 75% of men, 75% of voters in the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland, 74% of voters in the Baltimore suburbs and 71% of western Marylanders. Percentages were higher among women, African American and Baltimore City and Washington suburb voters.
If lies like the one above and others were known to your average citizen, I doubt they’d support it. After all, most people are under the assumption (based on lies and misinformation by groups like Join Together, the Brady Bunch, and the million err Four Mom March) that these are machine guns that are getting banned. That, however, is not the case.
February 12th, 2004 at 12:22 pm
I assume I’m the “Kevin” you refer to when you say “Of course even Kevin is wrong. An insignificant number of the cops (likely zero) were killed with rifles capable of automatic fire that fire medium power cartridges, which is the real definition of assault weapon.” I take issue with that. I’m going by the legal definition of the Federal “assault weapon ban.” Per that definition there have been several officers killed with AR-15 and AK-47 style weapons that might have had the evil flash-hider and bayonet lug that made them “assault weapons” in the eyes of the law. However, SKSs, M1 carbines, and Mini-14s don’t fall under that umbrella and never have.
What Maryland is considering, as I understand it, is a state implementation of the federal “ban.” What the VPC et. al want to achieve is much broader, including these firearms and anything else they can get under the umbrella.
February 12th, 2004 at 12:24 pm
Damn. Sorry, I missed the link.
February 12th, 2004 at 12:27 pm
I agree with your assessment and out of general smarminess was making the point rather in a roundabout way that the assault weapons ban doesn’t ban assault weapons.
February 12th, 2004 at 5:18 pm
Hell, SA, it doesn’t BAN anything. It’s another exercise in the left’s continuing redefinition of words until they’re meaningless so that they’ll eventually tell us black is white and we’ll be so tired of arguing with them that we’ll say “Yeah, whatever.”
But I get your point.