Last week, I noted a pretty stupid bill that would make the death penalty a sentencing option to any murder committed with an assault weapon. The bill was stupid for a couple of reasons. One is that murder is murder. The second is that there is now no such thing as an assault weapon in the eyes of the law. Now, the ATF agrees:

He rewrote it to allow the death penalty for murders committed with weapons that are federally banned. Smitherman said he believed this change would cover murders with fully automatic weapons.

But the ATF says he’s mistaken.

“There are no federally banned guns, either,” said Carl Bengtson, supervisory special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives. “They need to do some more tweaking.”

A federal law that had banned assault weapons was allowed to expire last year. Owners of automatic weapons, sometimes called machine guns, face specific tax and registration laws. But as long as a buyer pays $200, fills out a registration application and passes a background check, he or she can legally own an automatic, Bengtson said.

Few such guns are used in homicides, though.

So few in fact, it approaches one. Actually, it was only one and it was a weapon used by a cop. Then, the paper states:

A Florida State University study of guns used in crimes found that less than 1 percent of murders, even in high-crime areas such as Miami and Chicago, were committed with fully automatic weapons.

Actually, that is wrong. Less than 1 percent of murders are committed with assault weapons as defined under the now expired assault weapons ban. The ban did not ban assault weapons but weapons that looked like assault weapons.

Posted in uncategorized on April 11th, 2005 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |