Matt Valentine writing at The Atlantic:
These new, high-capacity guns were hitting the street at the height of the crack epidemic and the era of the drive-by shooting, in a newly deregulated market—in 1986, Congress had passed the Firearms Owners Protection Act. “There was in essence a perfect storm,” Daniel Webster told me. “That legislation greatly decreased risks for people who were diverting guns to criminals. The standards for convicting someone of violating federal firearms sales laws were increased substantially, at the same time that the penalties for those gun sales violations decreased. [Congress] decreased the budget for the ATF. They decreased the number of compliance inspections that they could do. They also rewrote the criteria for needing to have a federal license to sell firearms. So all those things were at play, including the type of guns that were being made.”
Annual gun deaths peaked in 1993. The following year, Congress adopted an assault-weapons ban that capped magazines at 10 rounds. Since the ban expired in 2004, handguns with 15-round capacity or greater have been used in several mass shootings …
First of all, there is no difference between “military” weapons and “civilian” weapons. Semiautomatics have been around for a very long time, just as have magazines that could hold more than just a few rounds. Bolt action rifles are in common use for deer hunting, and among snipers in the Army and Marines. Shotguns are used for turkey hunting, and for room clearing operations and CQB by the Army and Marines. This is entirely a false distinction.
Second, I am unmoved and completely unpersuaded and unimpressed by the discussion of statistics, whatever they happen to say, whether accidents, deaths, or crime. Statistics have nothing whatsoever to do with my rights (see also Kurt Hofmann’s wonderful article).
Finally, this is what the gun controllers do. When the facts don’t suit them, they change the subject. Matt moves from crime at its peak just before the so-called assault weapons ban, to removal of the ban, to [here Matt cannot say an increase in crime, so he turns the subject to] mass shootings. Matt wanted to say that crime increased and the assault weapons ban had something to do with it.
But he couldn’t, he knew his readers would call him out on lies. So he did the next best thing. He changed the subject and hoped that the reader would read what Matt really wanted to say.
And that is how you lie about guns. You make it all up when the facts don’t support your conclusions.
