Semi-Automatic Thinking on Gun Control (By Paul Barrett)

Assault (Weapon) rifle is a term that Sugarmann and some of his colleagues demonized in the early 1990s because they knew a lot of ordinary people confuse it with “machine gun.” (I describe this episode in some detail in a recent book.) Fully automatic machine guns, which spray bursts of bullets with a single pull of the trigger, are already illegal. In this context, “assault weapon” is nothing more than a scary-sounding synonym for a semiautomatic military-style rifle. Round-for-round, a semiautomatic military-style rifle is no more powerful or dangerous than a traditional wooden-stock deer-hunting rifle. (Traditional deer-hunting rifles, as it happens, are derived directly from military-style weapons of an earlier era.)
We tried banning assault weapons from 1994 through 2004, when the ban expired. The law had no significant effect on crime rates...not least that it focused on cosmetic features, such as whether rifles had bayonet mounts, which had nothing to do with lethality...The problem gun-control advocates confront is that we live in a society with upwards of 250 million firearms already in private hands, along with a lot of accoutrements. The right to “keep and bear” arms is protected by a foundational constitutional provision. The Second Amendment is more than a legal technicality. It represents independence, self-reliance, and security to many millions of Americans...
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See full article HERE
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Although I may have minor issues with Barrett, he gets it right more than wrong in his essay and it is still damn good work. Backward gun-hating legislatures like in California still have these useless provisions and are eagerly attempting to add more, as Barrett mentions, focused on cosmetic features which had nothing to do with lethality, yet they continue to do the bait & switch game with the public, looking for political capital and career enhancement by "solving" a non-existent "problem" and betraying their oaths to uphold the constitution by criminalizing law-abiding gun owners. They truly disgust me with their thoughtless tyrannical behavior.  As for Barrett's essay: 2 thumbs up and a sniff of Hoppe's Linseed oil for those wooden stocks...(S9).