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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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