Against a New Assault-Weapon Ban

Via John

 

Of all the gun deaths in the United States in a given year, the large majority — 60 percent or more — are suicides. Of the ones that are homicides, all rifles and shotguns together account for about 4 percent, and so-called assault rifles account for such a minuscule number of murders that law-enforcement agencies do not even keep statistics on them. The idea that American streets are running with blood because of “assault weapons” is entirely unsupported by the evidence.

 

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Dated

 

The Left is fixated for cultural reasons on firearms, which are associated in the suburban minds of sociology professors with backward rural life and government-mistrusting Second Amendment activists. Hence, Democrats constantly are seeking gun-control solutions to problems that have little or nothing to do with gun control, and hence the entirely unsurprising call by Hillary Rodham Clinton and others, in the bloody aftermath of Orlando, for a renewed ban on so-called assault weapons. 

 

A problem: Assault weapons do not, strictly speaking, exist.
 

“Assault weapon” is an almost exclusively aesthetic category, having nothing to do with the ballistic characteristics of the firearms in question. A sporting rifle with a walnut stock is just another sporting rifle; pull that walnut stock off and replace it with a black plastic one with an L-shaped grip and you have an “assault weapon.” The operation of the firearm remains unchanged, but the configuration of the stock (“the shoulder thing that goes up,” as New York Democrat Carolyn McCarthy famously put it) or the presence of barrel threading to accommodate a muzzle-flash suppressor (an accessory of keen interest to those who shoot in arid, wildfire-prone areas) makes an ordinary rifle an “assault weapon,” as does the presence of a lug for mounting a bayonet, though it has been a while since *bayonet charges were much in the news.

 

More @ NRO

 

 

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*"Fix Bayonets!" 

"And they began to yell and scream and curse like mad men. Rebel Yells, blood curdling Rebel Yells. Just like the men who followed Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart. Here in the godforsaken jungles of Vietnam one hundred years later another crazy-like-a-fox Virginian was ordering men to fix bayonets and charge."

 

 Ride The Thunder" Honour & Triumph In Vietnam