Posted on 06/03/2005 5:55:22 AM PDT by OESY
When the federal assault- weapons ban expired last September, its fans claimed that gun crimes and police killings would surge. Sarah Brady, one of the nation's leading gun-control advocates, warned, "Our streets are going to be filled with AK-47s and Uzis."
Well, over eight months have gone by and the only casualty has been gun-controllers' credibility. Letting the law expire only showed its uselessness.
Yet, while this lesson has been learned in the rest of the country — Illinois' Democrat-controlled state Assembly last week defeated both a proposed assault weapons and 50-caliber gun bans — New York's Legislature was going its own way. The Assembly last month passed new assault-weapon and 50-caliber bans....
The irrelevance of the assault-weapons bans to crime rates was to be expected. Not a single published academic study has ever shown that these bans have reduced any type of violent crime.
Even research funded by the Justice Department in the Clinton years found only that these bans' effect on gun violence "has been uncertain." And when those same authors released their updated report last August, looking at crime data up through 2000 — the first six full years of the federal law — they stated, "We cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation's recent drop in gun violence."...
The decision to demonize these particular guns and not, say, .475-caliber hunting rifles is completely arbitrary. The difference in width of these bullets is a trivial .025 inches. What's next? Banning .45-caliber pistols? Instead of protecting people from terrorists or criminals, the plain goal here is to gradually reduce the... guns that people can own.
Even for lawmakers, predictions must eventually matter. If legislators can't see that these laws have failed to deliver as promised, it's hard to know when facts will make a difference.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Yeah, and where is that AK-47 Sarah Brady promised me?
Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than all the guns I have ever owned...
It's nice to see that somebody in New York "gets it"!
Yeah, where are they. I always wanted one of those;)
We need to take it back. The frog pot is on full boil. Time to jump or die.
Logic and reason mean litle or nothing to fanatics. These people are fanatics.
Their aversion to guns rises from numerous sources.
1) They are afraid that an armed populace might someday grow sick of the liberal nonsense that is destroying America and avail themselves of the rights so lucidly laid out in the Declaration of Independence.
2)There is strong pressure from "minority" "leaders" for tough gun control measures as gun crime in minority neighborhoods is very high. These "minority" "leaders" and the political panderers who cater to them, of course, refuse to recognize the core cause of this violence, which is sociological, not technological. The fanatastic illegitimacy rate among certain minorty groups, the breakdown of the nuclear family in minority communities, and the inability of the government to provide an adequate substitute for self-respect, responsibility and a sense of pride and honor - things in part erased by prior liberal government programs are the root causes of these problems - not guns. But these liberal panderers in both parties would never enunciate such a truism.
3)And finally, they view guns as symbolic of white, male, Christian, European dominance. And as a symbol they view guns as far more deadly than their performance as a working tool.
The main function of guns is as a talisman of liberty. For all the blowhard talk you hear from the Michigan Militia types, the fact is that we will not need to engage in armed revolution so long as we retain our right to own guns. They are a very powerful symbol, to citizens and governmental minions alike, of the price that would be paid for stealing our ancient liberties. From weapons ownership, we gain a confidence and peace of mind which allows us to fearlessly criticize our leaders and governmental policies.
-ccm
I have more guns that I probably need but not as many as I'd like to have.
Blowhard talk? The government in all its forms chips away at our Rights and people feel that just because we can sit in our closets clutching our single shot .22 that we are still free?
We need a full stop restoration of our Rights or we WILL lose it all.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
And .. because all the braying about all the bad things that would happen - never happened. When we try to warn people about REALLY BAD THINGS - the public turns a deaf ear - because the dems have already proven to them that it's all hype. Very dangerous.
I encourage all interested in RKBA to read "Death By Government" by R.J. Rummel. Encourage your hoplophobe friends to read this book, or at least, give them a thumbnail version of the book.
Scary stuff.
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