Yet
another bad shot
*
16 September 2004 - Palm Springs Desert Sun
In
his Sept.
14 story, Jonathan Colburn quoted California Attorney General
spokeswoman Hallye Jordan as saying, “These are not hunting guns,
they are not sporting guns. They are designed to kill at close range
the maximum number people in the shortest period of time.” Apparently
Jordan is just as uninformed as the other supporters of this ill-advised
and ineffective ban in assuming that the law had banned guns that
it did not -- I wonder if she’s aware that the rifles in question
are still banned by a California state law with no sunset provision.
For
a specific weapon to be outlawed because it inflicts the maximum
number of casualties in the shortest period of time, wouldn’t that
weapon need features that actually enable it to kill more people
in a shorter period?
The
rifles that were banned fired the same (or smaller) ammunition at
the same rate (one per trigger pull) as any number of perfectly
legal double-action revolvers and semiautomatic pistols that, in
the hands of criminals, can kill just as many innocent people as
the rifles that were banned until Monday. The biggest difference
is that criminals always seem to find ways to acquire banned firearms
-- not so the law-abiding citizen.
* The Palm Springs Desert Sun has since
changed their file structure, rendering the saved URLs of my printed
letters obsolete
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