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Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Obama Wants to Ban 'Assault Weapons' but Does Not Know What They Are

From Reason via H/T at Instapundit:
See also: Health Care 'Reform.'
What exactly are these evil guns that are good for nothing but indiscriminate slaughter? Judging from their own words, Obama, the New York Times editorial board, Collins, and Clinton—like most people who support bans on so-called assault weapons—do not know what "assault weapons" are.
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In a 2014 essay titled "The Assault Weapon Myth," ProPublica reporter Lois Becket noted that these demonized guns are a "politically defined category" based on scary looks rather than criminal significance. "The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference," she wrote. "It turns out that big, scary military rifles don't kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do." Apparently the editors of the Times missed that essay, even though they published it. I guess they also missed the paper's own coverage of this issue, which has intermittently explained how arbitrary the definition of "assault weapon" is and noted that AR-15-style rifles like those used by the San Bernardino murderers are among the most popular guns in the United States.

At this point—27 years after the Violence Policy Center's Josh Sugarmann recommended targeting "assault weapons" based on their "menacing looks," taking advantage of "the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons"—there is no excuse for continuing to parrot myths about the special murder-facilitating features of these firearms. Either Obama, Clinton, Collins, and her colleagues at the Times do not know what they are talking about or they are deliberately misleading the public.
Actually, he really wants to ban ALL guns. It's the first incremental step. Like the ACA/Obamacare was to be the first step toward single payer.

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