Dear Editor,
In yesterday’s paper there was a letter to the editor that purported to demonstrate why an argument that appeared in the Boston Globe was so callous that it needed to be openly condemned.
Now, like a lot of these arguments there will always be extreme positions that might deserve an eye roll or something, but the one put forth in the Globe was not that way and the response printed here was simply and unabashed factually wrong.
First and foremost, let’s be crystal clear. The AR15 used in the Orlando shooting was not and never was an assault weapon. The AR15 is an assault styled weapon. It looks very much like its big brother, the M16A1 but is as different as night and day. It is a civilian sporting gun that is made to look military, but here is the key point... It functions exactly like every other magazine fed gun of any kind that is legal for the civilian market, be it hand gun or rifle.
One pull of the trigger sends one bullet out the front of the gun. An assault weapon, be it rifle or carbine or any other configuration is, in effect a machine gun. One pull of the trigger can send all the bullets the magazine is capable of holding down stream all at once.
This mistake is not just innocent semantics. It is the intentional and wilful misuse of language employed by the anti-gun lobby to incite and mislead as many people as possible in order to further their cause. It’s the Hillary Clinton syndrome. Lie about something often, long enough and it becomes the truth.
The simple fact is that the AR15 that this guy used to murder those innocent people was no more lethal than the handgun that he carried or any long barrel hunting or sporting rifle would have been barring single shot bolt action weapons. It is a “pimped out,” military looking gun that functions in a completely ordinary fashion. Why do people own them? Who knows?
Probably the same reason people that drive Hyundai’s wear Ferrari jackets, women wear knock off designer clothes and men wear fake Rolexes. An assault style weapons ban would have changed nothing in Orlando. The nut job would simply have bought any one of a hundred non-assault style weapons and had exactly the same fire power.
And there in lay the rub and what infuriates the legal and responsible gun owner. What we are talking about here is a complete whack job that broke no existing gun laws what so ever and used weapons legally purchased to commit this horrible crime. And the Globe guy got it right when he said that if a gun wasn’t available to the whack job he would found another way.
Five dollars’ worth of gas and a cigarette lighter and he could have killed 100 instead of just 49. In a free society It’s not hard to do evil if evil is your intent and if you want to have that discussion then that’s for another day. But for the “assault weapon” ban having any beneficial effect, that’s just chicken droppings. And just by the way… note that the routine murder rate on any weekend in Chicago or Detroit or even DC approaches and sometimes exceeds the Orlando body count every single weekend. It’s the people that are the criminals. Not the guns.
Steven Johnson
