Hillary & Co. Fight a Phony War on Gun Violence

From Charles C. W. Cooke at National Review:

Don’t believe me? Just ask the Violence Policy Center’s Josh Sugarmann, who, in a publicly available 1989 position paper, announced his intention to mislead the public into supporting a ban on everyday rifles by pretending that they were machine guns. “Until someone famous is shot, or something truly horrible happens,” Sugarmann wrote, “handgun restriction is simply not viewed as a priority.” But maybe, he continued cynically, another area might be ripe for exploitation instead:

Assault weapons — just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms – are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.

Contrary to popular belief, Sugarmann did not invent the term “assault weapon”; marketing departments within the firearms industry did that. Nevertheless, he and his supporters have been more than happy to abuse it in order to advance their agenda, and to do so in the full knowledge that they are perpetrating a fraud. It is thus that a phrase that started life as little more than glossy retail pabulum has become a sharp and effective tool with which the enemies of the right to keep and bear arms have sought to sow confusion, fear, and ignorance.

Remember, according to the FBI's 2011 statistics, only 323 people were killed by a rifle, all rifles. 1,694 were stabbed to death. 496 were clubbed to death and 728 were killed by hands or feet.

The whole assault weapons campaign was to scare the soccer mom into a ban. It's incrementalism. Get one weapon class at a time.