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Media claims Clinton Gun Ban would have stopped a planned attack on the Super Bowl

February 9th, 2008 by Double Tap

I ran across this article, and it made my blood boil. Why? Because it infers that if we had only allowed the Clinton Gun Ban to continue on, a planned attack on Super Bowl crowds never would have happened. That, my friends, is bulls**t.

From the East Valley Tribune in Arizona:

A semiautomatic weapon a Tempe man bought for $899 to commit mass murder at the Super Bowl was banned until three years ago.

Today, the AR-15 is one of the more popular rifles on the market.

(snip)

Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, said the AR-15 is being pushed by the industry, but he doesn’t believe it’s a good thing.

And since no one was hurt at the Super Bowl, the incident will be easily ignored, he said.

“We were lucky this time,” Sugarmann said, “and the question is: Will we be so lucky next time?”

Gosh, reading that, you’d think that if we’d only let the Clinton Gun Ban to continue, all those terrible semi-automatic rifles that look oh-so-scary wouldn’t exist and this guy couldn’t have done what he was planning on doing. The only problem is, that assertion is totally false.

Specifically, the 1994 Crime Bill banned so-called “assault rifles” with the following characteristics:

A semiautomatic rifle that has an ability to accept a detachable magazine and has at least two of the following: a folding or telescoping stock; a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon; a bayonet mount; a flash suppressor or threaded barrel; and a grenade launcher.

So, you could still have a rifle that looked and functioned exactly like an assault rifle, as long as it didn’t have, say, a folding stock and a bayonet mount. As a result, firearms manufacturers simply built rifles that looked and functioned like an assault rifle (albeit in semi-automatic form), minus the bayonet mount (who needs that anyway?) and with fixed stocks (only a minor inconvenience). The guns otherwise looked and functioned exactly like their banned counterparts.

Now, back to our original story. Even if the perpetrator in the Super Bowl case, Kurt William Havelock, had attempted to perform his act of terror at the 1996 Super Bowl XXX (played down the road in Tempe, Arizona), he could have easily have purchased a rifle with all of the same functions of the rifle he bought in 2008.

The 1994 Crime Bill was a dumb law and did nothing except make a few people feel good. I doubt it stopped a single crime and did nothing to make America safer.

tag Category : 2nd Amendment, Gun Control
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