Posted By:
David VarghaWho cares how these things are defined. Contrary to what you said (twice) in this thread, federal law doesn't prohibit ownership of automatic weapons, which was the point of my follow-up post.
You are being disingenuous, as most radical, anti-gun people usually are. Yes, existing automatic weapons are allowed to be owned by people who had them prior to the restrictions and yes, they can be sold to other law-abiding citizens after a background check, etc. However, the manufacturing of automatic weapons for sale to private citizens has been illegal in the United States since 1986. This has placed the cost of ownership out of the reach of most people.
About half the machine guns in the United States are owned by civilians; the other half are in the hands of police departments and the military. The number is on the order of 0.1% of all guns in the United States. Texas leads the U.S. in private ownership of automatic weapons, but we don't seem to be having a return to the days of Al Capone here. Furthermore, since the original law was enacted in 1934, only two legally owned machine guns have been used in a crime, and one was by a law-enforcement officer.
You see, more laws prohibiting and restricting gun ownership accomplish NOTHING! The killer at VA Tech was hardly deterred by the laws against murder or carrying the guns onto campus. Criminals are never deterred by the law. Why is that such a difficult concept for people like you to understand?
As to the lumping in of semi-automatic weapons as some evil development by the gun manufacturers, again the disingenuity leaps right to the front. They have been around for a long, long time. Semi-automatic weapons simply marked a technology advance from revolvers whereby the shooter can now fire as fast as he can pull the trigger. It is amazing how this simple advance in weapon technology (which is very old news) is continually put forth as some evil conspiracy to create war in the streets or some other such nonsense.
I'm sorry to go on so long on these posts, but I am sick and tired of the disinformation campaign being put forth by people such as PC either because they have an agenda and don't care to research the FACTS (stubborn things as they are) or because they are flat-out lying.
DavidVargha@hotmail.com