In Alabama, there is a law proposed that would:

State senators are working on expanding Alabama’s death penalty law to cover murderers who use illegal assault weapons, and they are trying to narrow it to exclude minors and the mentally retarded.

Huh? First, murder is murder. Why bother with assault weapons? Second, the assault weapons ban no longer exists, which the article reports as:

Smitherman’s bill would not affect as many weapons as it would have a year ago. The federal ban on 19 military-style assault weapons expired in September, but some foreign-made assault weapons, such as the Israeli-manufactured Uzi, are still banned under a 1989 federal law.

The bill would be pointless as there is no assault weapons ban. Additionally, the foreign-made assault weapons are not banned under a 1989 federal law. They are prohibited from importation via executive order and subject to limits on the amount of foreign made parts they can have. Additionally, there’s this:

Smitherman, who is chairman of the committee, also got the committee to vote unanimously for a companion bill that would make it a crime, punishable by up to life in prison, to knowingly furnish a banned assault weapon to a convicted felon who then used it to commit a crime.

Too bad there are no banned assault weapons.

Posted in uncategorized on April 8th, 2005 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |