The phony "assault weapon" ban put forth by Chicago's Mayor Daley, against semiautomatic sporting firearms with a military appearance is based on the now expired 1994 federal ban.  That ban was based on a lie.  The gun-ban lobby in 1994 were quick to see the military-semiautomatics as the perfect scam to confuse and deceive the public by implying they were machine guns.

Josh Sugarmann, founder of the radically anti-gun Violence Policy Center, admitted this deception as early as 1988 when he said, "The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons - anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun -- can only increase the public support for restrictions on these weapons."

All the so-called "assault weapons" on the 1994 ban list were semi-automatic firearms, not machine guns, and were not easily converted to machine guns.  Semi-automatic firearms have been used by the general public for over 100 years.  Actual machine guns have been heavily regulated by the Federal Government since 1934, and are already banned in Illinois.

Some anti-gun zealots claim that "assault weapons" are more powerful and cause wounds more serious than other injuries.  This has been contradicted by Dr. Martin L. Fackler, Director of the Wound Ballistics Laboratory at the Letterman Army Institute of Research. He noted that typical "assault rifles" fire smaller-than-average ammunition.  He has shown through ballistics experiments that this ammunition has milder wounding effects than civilian hunting ammunition or regular infantry cartridges.  Because "assault weapons" fire smaller, pointed bullets they tend to produce smaller wounds which are less lethal.

The guns banned aren't "crime guns".  Indeed before the 1994 ban was passed, the FBI reported that rifles of any kind - of which semi-automatic rifles are a tiny subset - are used in less than one percent of all crimes.

Syndicated Columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing in the April 5, 1996 Washington Post, said "Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic, purely symbolic move. . . Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation."

In spite of all their hand wringing and hysteria notwithstanding, ban proponents have yet to explain or prove the connection between law-abiding citizens ownership of semi-automatic firearms and drug/gang related street crimes committed in Chicago.  There has been a handgun ban in Chicago since 1982, and the Peoples Republic of Cook County has had an "assault weapons" ban for years.  No one, especially the big city liberals, could call either of these bans successful.  The worst thing about these bans, other than their complete failure to effect positive change, is the fact they allow politicians like Mayor Daley to pretend he is doing something about the high crime rate in Chicago which he can't control, in spite of the 1982 handgun ban, and the Cook County "assault weapons" ban.

You can't control crime by disarming law-abiding citizens as these two bans prove.


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