Sen. Feinstein lunges for our guns

Gun control worksDec. 27, 2012

By John Seiler

Like King George III, tyrant, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., doesn’t like our guns, which are the guardians of all our other freedoms. If you’re disarmed, the government can do what it wants to you, as the disarmed, repressed societies of Europe show (not to mention China, North Korea, etc.)

So can criminals do what they want to you, as Mexico shows. Mexico has extremely tight anti-gun laws, yet it suffered 47,515 murders just from the drug cartels alone the past five years. The Narcotraficantes love anti-gun laws because it means their victims won’t be able to shoot back.

Feinstein has introduced a new bill that bans “assault weapons,” even some pistols. Except that “assault weapon” is just a fancy name for “mean-looking rifle.” If DiFi ever had served in the U.S. military, she might know that. But she knows nothing of such things. Instead, she went into politics.

In the press release concerning her bill, Feinstein maintains:

“In a Department of Justice study (pdf), Jeffrey Roth and Christopher Koper find that the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban was responsible for a 6.7 percent decrease in total gun murders, holding all other factors equal. They write: ‘Assault weapons are disproportionately involved in murders with multiple victims, multiple wounds per victim, and police officers as victims.’”

But that was a 1997 study.

She also cites a study for which Koper was the principal author. It was written in 2004 for the National Institute of Justice, part of the U.S. Department of Justice. She wrote:

“In a University of Pennsylvania study (pdf), Christopher Koper reports that the use of assault weapons in crime declined by more than two-thirds by about nine years after 1994 Assault Weapons Ban took effect.”

But she didn’t cite this conclusion in the Koper study:

“It is Premature to Make Definitive Assessments of the Ban’s Impact on Gun Crime

“Because the ban has not yet reduced the use of LCMs (large-case magazines) in crime, we cannot clearly credit the ban with any of the nation’s recent drop in gun violence. However, the ban’s exemption of millions of pre-ban AWs [assault-weapons] and LCMs ensured that the effects of the law would occur only gradually. Those effects are still unfolding and may not be fully felt for several years into the future, particularly if foreign, pre-ban LCMs continue to be imported into the U.S. in large numbers.”

Also:

“The findings of the previous chapters suggest that it is premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun violence. Although criminal use of AWs has declined since the ban, this reduction was offset through at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipped with LCMs. As argued previously, the LCM ban has greater potential for reducing gun deaths and injuries than does the AW ban.”

Magazines

However, her new legislation still would allow 10-round LCMs. So all a potential killer would have to do would be to pop the magazines in and out real fast. I learned how to do that in U.S. Army boot camp at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo. back in 1978. Maybe if DiFi had gone to boot camp, she might know that.

The drill sergeant also told us that, a few months back, on the same firing range a psycho recruit had killed a fellow recruit. But his rampage didn’t last long because one of the drill sergeants picked up a weapon and shot the killer.

Our drill sergeant was trying to stress the importance of range safety, and of how any rampage wouldn’t last long because a gun range, obviously, has a lot of guys with guns. The psycho recruit already had passed Army intelligence and psychological tests. For me, the added lesson was that the only real way to stop a psycho shooter is for sane people to be armed.

Moreover, the shooter in the Aurora killings this year used a 100-round LCM which jammed because the spring in such huge LCMs gets old and loses its flexibility. If he had used 10-round magazines, as Feinstein’s legislation would mandate, he could have kept on killing.

We’ll see how far national gun control goes. Democrats from rural states know that it could lead to their defeat in 2014, possibly giving Republicans control of the Senate. So if we’re fortunate, any attacks on the Second Amendment will fail in Congress.

However, we’ll probably get some state restrictions on guns from the Democratic supermajority in the California Legislature. If they go too far, thousands more law-abiding, productive citizens will leave this state for freedom. Including, eventually, yours truly.



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