One week to go
There is one week to go before the sunset of the assault weapons ban. Publicola, The Geek, and Matt have set up a new blog to monitor the death of the ban called Walking The Walls. This blog will have some live blogging of the senate floor.
For info on how you can fight the ban, see the Geek’s post on calling congressmen and the president. Get contact info for your reps here.
Here’s the NRA’s resource page for fighting the Assault Weapons Ban.
Additionally, AWBSunset is a good source of info on the ban. The anti-gunners will not let this die without a fight. The increased hysteria in the media is a good sign of that.
Like this piece by Swanee Hunt, which is so full of lies, picking one doesn’t do it justice:
I don’t know about you, but keeping AK-47s, Uzis and TEC-9s off our streets seems like a good idea to me.
The same old rhetoric about AKs and Uzis. This is false because both are still available in semi-automatic configuration and the full-auto versions have been regulated since 1934. Additionally, a 1989 executive order bans the import of Uzis and AKs.
More powerful than the guns most cops carry, they fire hundreds of rounds in just a couple minutes and oftentimes pierce body armor.
The ban does not affect machine guns and any rifle round will penetrate body armor. Assault weapons fire medium powered ammunition. A hunting rifle is more powerful.
According to data maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, assault weapons are 20 times more likely to be used in a crime than conventional firearms.
That is a blatant lie. The weapons are used in less than 1% of crimes. Both the CDC and DOJ have said the ban has no impact on crime.
A report from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, using data from the ATF, shows that the number of assault weapons traced to crime has dropped 66 percent since the law passed.
The ATF has also said that gun trace data (which is not always used to trace to crime) is a useless measure for determining the impact on crime.
The infamous TEC-9, a gun favored by murderers and criminals for its light weight and ability to mask fingerprints . . .
Mask fingerprints? That’s a new one to me. Most guns, because of their checkered grips, don’t hold fingerprints very well but no gun I know of masks them.
When the law was passed, 16 percent of gun murders of police officers were with assault weapons. Two years later, it had dropped to zero
Another outright fabrication. The VPC says the number is 41 since 1998, which is also a fabrication.
This is what we’re up against. An opinion piece so full of distortions and outright lies that, if you believed this woman’s supposed facts, you would support the ban. However, she is completely full of shit..
Update: I have found Swanee Hunt’s email address swanee_hunt@harvard.edu. Other contact info is here.
September 7th, 2004 at 11:26 am
It’s hard to tell with people like this if they know they’re full of shit, but don’t care because they want to save The Children or some such, or whether they’re just living in fantasy-land.
September 7th, 2004 at 12:58 pm
The Tec-9 had a finish that they advertised being impervious to damage from the oils & such left by your hand. More or less they said fingerprints wouldn’t cause it to rust, not that no fingerprints would be left. But the anti’s have been running with that misunderstanding ever since the first ads came out.