Ever the Gun-Grabber, Lautenberg Lies About Failed Gun Law in CNN Op-Ed

It seems all I have done the past several days is "correct" obvious attempts by the leftist media/political machine to create false narratives about the gun and magazines used by Jared Lee Loughner in his deadly assault last Saturday, and when I haven't been dealing with that, I've been dealing with pundits and politicians lying about the failed 1994 "assault weapons ban" that expired in 2004.

To hear them tell it, the ban kept blood from flowing in the streets and ended threats of gun violence. That is a neat trick, as the ban did not radically affect the violent crime rate during its entire existence, nor did violent crime spike as a result of the ban expiring. To those with knowledge of the ban's actually language and effects, this is less than surprising. After all, the ban did not in any way address the lethality, range, rate of fire or accuracy of any firearms. It was nothing more or less than a ban on the name of certain firearms, along with a list of cosmetic features that bore no relation to how well firearms functioned. A perfect example of a "banned" gun was the Tec-9 pistol.

Demonized by liberal gun-grabbers as the kind of "assault weapon" favored by criminals, it underwent utterly cosmetic changes—the elimination of the barrel shroud and threaded muzzle—and was out on the street as the AB-10 the very next day. Gun-control advocates claimed victory, but accomplished precisely nothing in terms of saving lives or reducing crime.

So it goes with Senatorial vulture Frank Lautenberg, who wants to use the bodies of Jared Loughner's victims as pulpit to press forward once again with gun control schemes. His editorial at CNN today is replete with half-truths and lies, with this being the most objectionable.

If the shooter didn't have access to the high-capacity magazine that he used, he would have stopped to reload sooner and lives might have been saved.

Loughner's magazine was attached to a 9 mm Glock 19 semi-automatic handgun, which is the preferred weapon of deranged madmen. In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho used the same model in the Virginia Tech shooting spree, which claimed 32 lives.

The Senator has carelessly libeled hundreds of thousands of police officers, military servicemen and women, and law-abiding citizens around the world that rely upon Glock pistols, and like all would-be tyrants, he would use the actions of a loathsome individual to justify his attempt to usurp the freedoms of the rest of society.

He then goes on to argue:

This is common-sense legislation, and there is no justification for keeping these large-capacity devices on the market.

The sad irony is that high-capacity magazines were illegal from 1994 until 2004 when the federal assault weapons ban was in place. In addition to dangerous gun magazines, this groundbreaking law also outlawed AK-47s, Uzis and other semi-automatic firearms.

These are the kinds of guns soldiers used on faraway battlefields; they don't belong in our communities.

The unintended irony of his pronouncement that such magazines are suitable for military and hence militia use is not doubt lost upon him, but that is dwarfed by the magnitude of the lie he continues to spread.

These so-called "high capacity" magazines were never illegal to buy, sell, trade, possess or use during the entire life of the ban. They were freely available for commercial sale, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, were bought, sold, and used.

The law banned the import of foreign high capacity magazines, and marked new magazines manufactured after the law went into effect for law enforcement use only. All previously manufactured magazines were completely legal, even those thousands of brand-new magazines sitting in packages in the warehouses of wholesalers and retailers, which were never in serious threat of being depleted.

Likewise, "AK-47s, Uzis and other semi-automatic firearms" were never in short supply during the laughably labeled "ban." You could walk into gun stores across the breadth of America and pick up AR-15 or AK-pattern rifles, or many other semi-automatic firearms. Manufacturers simply shrugged their heads at the absurdity of the law passed, and went about releasing the same functional weapons, with minor and superfluous cosmetic differences.

The simple fact of the matter is that the petty tyrannies that men like Lautenberg desire to impose on others merely restricts the rights of the lawful, at the expense of liberty.

That, of course, is far harder to sell than his fiction that he's done something worthwhile in the past that he'd like to replicate.

After all, who would buy the claims of the honest liberal politician proclaiming, "I want to re-impose upon you a law that failed before?"