Buzz Paths

There are no words for what happened in Connecticut this past week. It was a travesty like nothing else. My heart breaks for the children and adults that were killed by a tortured young man and for the families and friends who were devastated by this act of a lunatic.

Our president and the press immediately jumped on this to go after the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. They have been using jargon, incorrect terminology, statistics, as if it were fact.

The president called on Congress Wednesday to reinstate an assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 and to pass legislation that would close the gun show “loophole,” which allows people to purchase firearms from private dealers without a background check. Obama also said he wanted Congress to pursue the possibility of limiting high-capacity ammunition clips. [6] Nancy Pelosi is now asking for a ban of “Assault Magazines”. Again there is NO SUCH ANIMAL! If you are going to try to argue, PLEASE learn the correct terminology. Otherwise you sound like a total fool. [9]

Let’s get something straight. An AR-15 IS NOT an assault weapon. It is a semi-automatic rifle. The media put the label assault weapon on guns with plastic furniture. To be honest, you can do more damage with a 12-gauge shotgun than with an AR15. The term “assault weapon” was a spin-off of the U.S. military’s definition of assault rifles. The U.S. Department of Defense has long defined assault rifles as fully automatic rifles used for military purposes, not semi-automatic. In 1954, Eugene Stoner designed the AR15 for Armalite. Armalite sold the patents to Colt and in1959 the AR15 was introduced to the public. Early Colt AR-15s, their magazines, and their operator’s manuals were marked with ArmaLite’s name. Colt retained the AR-15 designation on commercial rifles. To this day Colt has a model designation with the letters AR, which stands for “ArmaLite Rifle” NOT “Assault Rifle” which most people assume it means. [8]

Fully automatic weapons have been prohibited in the U.S. since the National Firearms Act of 1934. Fully automatic firearms can spray fire with a single pull of the trigger, while semi-automatic guns fire one shot with each pull of the trigger. You can purchase full auto but the paperwork and price is prohibitive. For example: A Class III M16 which is what the AR15 is based on starts at $15,000 IF you can even find one for sale. The National Firearms Act of 1934 is very strict. [10]

I would love for someone to explain what the gun show loophole is? Do any of you really know? There is no loophole. All firearms purchased at gun shows must have the proper paperwork filled out and a background check is done on each person who purchases a firearm. Each purchase is run through the national database run by the ATF, FBI and State Police in each State. The purchase cannot be completed until the background check is run and approved. There is no such thing as a “private dealer”. All dealers MUST possess a Federal Firearms License more commonly known as an FFL and run the background check. It is a felony not to.

Obama has no idea what he is talking about. There is no such animal as a “high capacity clip”. There are magazines and clips. Clips feed a magazine a magazine feeds the firearm. He is referring to a magazine that holds more than ten rounds.

I would appreciate everyone to watch this video “The Truth About Assault Weapons” and educate yourself as to what an assault weapon really is. Once you get your terminology straight we can have an honest discussion about this. I can almost bet that 99.9% of the people in this country have no real knowledge of firearms except what they hear and see in the news, movies and television. Here is the link to the video:

Semi-automatic firearms were introduced in the late 1800s, but gun control supporters didn’t begin calling them “assault weapons” until the 1980s, when they realized that they had failed in their original goal—getting handguns banned—and needed a new issue. That assessment is not based upon a mere hunch. In 1988, an anti-handgun group led by the former communications director for the National Coalition to Ban Handguns encouraged gun control supporters to recognize that efforts to get handguns banned had failed and to shift their energies to semi-automatic “assault weapons,” describing it as a “new topic” that could “strengthen the handgun restriction lobby.”

For the benefit of people who aren’t familiar with firearm terminology, a fully automatic firearm can fire repeatedly and very fast when the trigger is pulled; an example is the military’s M16 rifle, which can fire 30 rounds of ammunition in about 2.5 seconds. Fully automatic firearms are defined as “machine guns” under federal law, and are heavily regulated by the National Firearms Act of 1934, the Gun Control Act of 1968, and longstanding state laws. Hollywood movie studios are allowed to use fully-automatic firearms for movie-making purposes, so most people are familiar with them from their use by fictional action heroes, pretending to mow down extraterrestrial aliens and other sensational adversaries with exaggerated amounts of make-believe gunfire. However, other than for gun control supporters’ propaganda purposes, fully automatic firearms have nothing to do with semi-automatic “assault weapon” legislation or laws, all of which have come about since the early 1980s.

Semi-automatics and all other firearms, such as bolt-actions, pump-actions, lever-actions, revolvers, double-barreled shotguns, and single-shot firearms, fire only once when the trigger is pulled. They’ve been commonly used for self-defense, hunting and target shooting for more than a century. Though gun control supporters initially demanded that only semi-automatic firearms be banned as “assault weapons,” today they want pump-actions banned as “assault weapons” too, apparently on the theory that people who don’t know one century-old firearm type from another will go along with banning it, so long as it’s called an “assault weapon.” (2)

So-called “assault weapons” aren’t fully automatic machine guns, or “military,” or “rapid-fire” “weapons of war” “designed for “combat” or “the battlefield,” or “designed to be spray-fired from the hip.” But gun control supporters and some in the media refer to the guns in that manner. TV news programs even go so far as to show fully automatic machine guns being fired during stories about semi-automatic “assault weapons.”

Dow Jones Factiva search found over 90,000 newspaper articles and editorials referring to semi-automatic firearms as “assault” guns since Jan. 1, 1985, and thousands of them used other verbiage appropriate only to fully automatic machine guns. Many appeared in the weeks before the federal semi-automatic “assault weapon” ban was imposed in 1994, and before it expired in 2004, periods during which gun control supporters were trying to panic the public into urging Congress to vote for the ban.

As noted above, in 1980 the New York Times incorrectly and oxymoronically referred to moderately powered semi-automatics designed for civilians as “high-powered semiautomatic military assault weapons.” In 1985, Newsweek incorrectly and hyperbolically referred to semi-automatic firearms as “machine guns,” “automatic weapons,” “military-style assault guns,” and “modern combat weapons,” and with other such terms. And in 1988, the New Right Watch said “[T]he 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 chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

In 1989, following a crime involving a semi-automatic rifle, Time magazine, having previously said that it didn’t consider itself obligated to be objective about guns, after having been challenged about its earlier articles containing unsupported, provocative statements advocating gun control, led the media’s campaign for a national gun ban with its “Armed America” issue, employing a Halloween-style cover. Scary covers are a newsstand sales gimmick for which Time has become known, inspiring Reason magazine to compose a “Top 10 list of the most horrifying, silly, irresponsible, or downright ridiculous Time cover panics from the past 40 years.”

Other than for gun control supporters’ propaganda purposes, fully automatic machine guns used by the military “on foreign battlefields” have nothing to do with the semi-automatic “assault weapon” issue. As noted, fully-automatics — commonly seen on TV or YouTube.com being used by our troops against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, or by Hollywood action heroes, mowing down extraterrestrial aliens and other sensational adversaries — can fire repeatedly, as long as the trigger is held down. For that reason, they’ve been defined as “machineguns” and heavily regulated by the National Firearms Act since 1934, their importation and manufacture for private purposes have been prohibited under the Gun Control Act since 1968 and 1986, respectively, and they’ve been prohibited in about half the states for decades. By comparison, semi-automatic firearms, which gun control supporters call “assault weapons,” fire only one shot when the trigger is pulled.

On Nov. 17, 1993, just before the Senate voted for the federal “assault weapon ban,” NBC’s Today show tried to encourage the legislation’s passage with a story that showed fully automatic machine guns being fired, falsely portraying such guns as the type covered by the legislation. Criticized for its error, NBC admitted in writing that it had made a “mistake,” but it ran more machine gun footage in another “assault weapon” story two weeks later, and again in April 1994, just before the House of Representatives voted on the proposed ban.

A decade later, just before the 10-year federal “assault weapon” ban expired in 2004 — when gun control supporters were trying to panic people into urging Congress to make the ban permanent — CNN’s John Zarella teamed with gun control supporter Ken Jenne — later convicted of mail fraud and tax evasion, and sent to a federal penitentiary — in a story showing a fully-automatic machine gun being fired, followed by Zarella and Jenne falsely claiming that guns of that type would be freely sold if Congress allowed the 1994 “semi-automatic assault weapon” ban to expire.

Similarly, in 2009, NBC-5 Chicago reporter Kim Vatis teamed with gun control supporter Andrew Traver, the Special Agent in Charge of BATFE’s Chicago office, nominated by President Obama to be promoted to the agency’s director, to deceive TV viewers about the kinds of guns that were affected by the federal “assault weapon” ban. “It’s a killing machine. Assault weapons (sic) made for the war zone,” Vatis intones, as video footage of overseas war zones rolls, the sounds of machine guns being fired echoing in the background. Vatis’ and Travers’ sham continues with the pair taking turns recklessly firing a fully-automatic machine gun, a type of firearm that is indeed common to overseas war zones, but which has nothing to with the semi-automatic “assault weapon” ban.

Pretending that she is about to fire a semi-automatic “assault weapon,” Vatis says that the gun–in fact, a fully automatic machinegun possessed by the BATFE–is “almost impossible to control.” Then, to prove the point, Vatis appears to deliberately wave the machine gun back and forth as she wildly fires a large quantity of ammunition over a wide area, a dangerous stunt that Travers should have known better than to allow. The text version of Vatis’ story–as inaccurate as her gunfire–disapprovingly notes, “The assault weapon ban expired in 2004.” [3]

I do feel that anyone who is going to own a firearm should have to go through a psych exam, training and qualification in order to purchase and own. Just as you have to take classes and qualify to drive a car. There are more car fatalities than gun fatalities in the United States. http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/05/bruce-krafft/comparing-car-and-gun-fatalities-is-misleading-and-irrelevant/ and have to re-qualify once a year or every other year just as law enforcement does.

What happened in CT is horrible and should have never have happened. However, if this whack job wanted to kill people he didn’t need guns. He could have built a bomb just like the crazies in Oklahoma City. They used kerosene and fertilizer to make the bomb and a rental van to deliver it. So should we ban fertilizer, kerosene and rental vans? Richard Speck the serial killer strangled women with their own panty hose and then stabbed them with a knife. Should we ban panty hose and knives? What about the lunatics running around stabbing children to death in China? No guns involved and children are dead. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7715249/China-censors-attack-news-to-calm-panic-after-ninth-child-stabbing-in-weeks.html. If these nut jobs want to kill, they will. No regulation is going to stop them.

It has now been over 10 years since gun owners in Australia were forced by law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by their own Government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars. It didn’t work. Crime is up in Australia.

While the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not, and criminals still possess their guns. Criminals in Australia now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed. Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws ONLY adversely affect only the law-abiding citizens. I find it interesting that the States with the very strict gun laws are the States where all these killings are happening. The revisionist history of anti-rights proponents who claim that since Australia instituted their gun ban, there have been no mass murders, despite the recent “gun-free” massacre of 135 Australians. [7]

Look what happened in Norway last year. Did the gun ban prevent a mass killing? I think not. (1)Norway already has strict regulation of firearms, but this is an irrelevance when considering the actions of Anders Breivik. There are also laws in that country against impersonating a police officer, against setting off bombs, and against massacring children. Most people follow these. But then, most people are not the problem. Most people do not get out of bed and plan terrorist attacks. Those who do are beyond the law and will not be constrained by changes to it. In a free society, maniacs will always find a way.

This is not a new concept. Cesare Baccaria outlined this truth in his seminal book Crimes & Punishments in 1764, in a passage that made such an impression upon Thomas Jefferson that he copied it into his daybook and quoted it at length in letters to his nephew and to
James Madison:

The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? And does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons.

A better question than “How did the shooter get his guns?” is “What would have happened had others at Utøya had had access to weapons too?” If Breivik had been denied his monopoly on violence, we may have read a different story. As it was, Breivik could have been fairly confident that he would not be challenged — even by the police, who are unarmed except in special circumstances, and who took an hour and a half to get to the scene.

Norway’s system is the worst of both worlds. Licenses are tied to interests — farming, hunting, sports — rather than to rights. Transportation of firearms is heavily restricted, and there is no such thing as a concealed-carry permit. The police are unarmed. We have heard much about how “uncontroversial” the issue is in Norway, but it should be more so. Currently, it is a veritable paradise for those with ill intent who know that their actions will go unchecked.
The United States is no stranger to gun violence, but it is inconceivable that a shooter could have terrorized such a large area for an hour and a half with impunity in, say, Idaho. When Charles Whitman ran amok at the University of Texas in 1966, his intended victims started shooting back. A policeman eventually killed him. As John Lott Jr. has persuasively argued, the relationship between guns and crime is counter intuitive; even those who do not own guns are protected by those who do, both actively and, because criminal behavior is affected by calculation of risk, passively.

To live in freedom is to expose ourselves to the occasional outburst of the insane and the criminal. We cannot stop those who have evil in their hearts, but we can make sure that those who do not — the citizenry and the police — are given a fighting chance to protect us all.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied the “assault weapon” ban of 1994 and other gun control attempts, and found “insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws reviewed for preventing violence.” A 2004 critical review of research on firearms by a National Research Council panel also noted that academic studies of the assault weapon ban “did not reveal any clear impacts on gun violence” and noted “due to the fact that the relative rarity with which the banned guns were used in crime before the ban … the maximum potential effect of the ban on gun violence outcomes would be very small.”

The United States Department of Justice National Institute of Justice found should the ban be renewed, its effects on gun violence would likely be small, and perhaps too small for reliable measurement, because rifles in general, including rifles referred to as “assault rifles” or “assault weapons”, are rarely used in gun crimes.

That study by Christopher S. Koper, Daniel J. Woods, and Jeffrey A. Roth of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania found no statistically significant evidence that either the assault weapons ban or the ban on magazines holding more than 10 bullets had reduced gun murders.

Research by John Lott in the 2000 second edition of More Guns, Less Crime provided the first research on state and the Federal Assault Weapon Bans. The 2010 third edition provided the first empirical research on the 2004 sunset of the Federal Assault Weapon Ban. Generally, the research found no impact of these bans on violent crime rates, though the third edition provided some evidence that Assault Weapon Bans slightly increased murder rates. Lott’s book The Bias Against Guns provided evidence that the bans reduced the number of gun shows by over 20 percent. Koper, Woods, and Roth studies focus on gun murders, while Lott’s looks at murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults. Unlike their work, Lott’s research accounted for state Assault Weapon Bans and 12 other different types of gun control laws.

Again I will say that a psych exam, training, qualification and re-qualification should be required for anyone to own a firearm.

China has censored news of school attacks in an attempt to calm public panic after seven toddlers were hacked to death with a cleaver in the ninth violent assault on children in weeks. [5]

All Israeli children are protected by at least one armed person in every school, on every school bus, at school functions and field trips. Parents and teachers are trained and armed. They volunteer to protect their children because they love them. They made a conscious decision that killing them would never again be made so easy. Last week, a total of zero children died in school shootings in Israel. [4]

So you don’t need a gun to commit a mass murder. As I stated earlier, did the whackjobs in Oklahoma City use guns? No, they used fertilizer and kerosene with a truck delivery system. So should we ban fertilizer, kerosene and trucks? Richard Speck the serial killer used panty hose and knives to kill his victims. Should we outlaw panty hose and knives?

The bottom line is this: The Connecticut shooter was an emotionally disturbed young man who snapped, took his mother’s guns and killed as many people as he could. A knife, a baseball bat, a chainsaw or even his bare hands could have had the same results.

The “conversation” we should be having is whether there are ways to identify such troubled individuals early and intervene with appropriate mental health services so that the Adam Lanzas of the world never get to the point of picking up a gun or any other weapon.

With guns, we are ‘citizens’. Without them, we are ‘subjects’.

So once again, please know what you are talking about before you start making statements about what you think you know is fact.

1. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/272787/norway-and-gun-control-charlie-cooke#

2. http://gunbanfacts.com/Get_the_Facts/History.aspx

3. http://www.gunbanfacts.com//Get_the_Facts/History/hoping.aspx

4. http://www.ammoland.com/2012/12/18/children-are-dying-for-our-insanity-emulate-israel-to-prevent-mass-killings/#axzz2FX0P4uJQ

5. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7715249/China-censors-attack-news-to-calm-panic-after-ninth-child-stabbing-in-weeks.html

6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/19/obama-gun-violence-task-force_n_2331238.html

7. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2225517/posts

8. http://www.armalite.com/images/Library%5CHistory.pdf

9. http://freedomoutpost.com/2012/12/pelosi-assault-magazines-have-to-be-outlawed/

10. http://www.atf.gov/firearms/nfa/

11. http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2012/05/bruce-krafft/comparing-car-and-gun-fatalities-is-misleading-and-irrelevant/

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