By Bruce A.
Clark baclark@med.pitt.edu
(Written 4/10/96)
A Letter to Mr. Gingrich
...
If your party permits the banned assault weapons to return to America's
streets, it will implicate itself in every murder in which these
weapons are used afterwards.
This is factually in error. The so-called assault weapons ban removed
nothing from the streets. It only prevented the future sale of certain
named weapons and and a somewhat vague and confused selection of unnamed
weapons, while permitting many other functionally-identical, but less
"scary-looking," weapons to continue to be sold. Since the banned guns
play such a minuscule role in crime to begin with, the net effect of this
law is essentially nothing at all, except to inconvenience law-abiding
people.