From The Washington Post:
The gun used in the Orlando shooting is becoming mass shooters’ weapon of choice
Last night in Orlando, a man armed with an assault-style rifle killed at least 50 people and wounded 53 others in a crowded nightclub.
Six months ago, in San Bernardino, Calif., a man and woman armed with assault-style rifles killed 14 people and wounded 20 others at a holiday party.
The author cites a couple other cases and continues:
One common denominator behind these and other high-casualty mass shootings in recent years is the use of assault style rifles, capable of firing many rounds of ammunition in a relatively short period of time, with high accuracy. And their use in these types of shooting is becoming more common: There have been eight high-profile public mass shootings since July of last year, according to a database compiled by Mother Jones magazine. Assault-style rifles were used in seven of those.
In the past 10 years, assault-style rifles have been used in 14 public mass shootings. Half of those shootings have occurred since last June.
There is no such thing as an assault rifle. Sure, to the untrained eye, they look 'scary' and are painted black and have lots of attachments but they are a very logical outgrowth of your great-grandparent's musket. The same progress in engineering and metallurgy that drives the incredible improvement in computers also drives the improvement in many other areas - one is guns. The AR-15 platform is a work of genius - Eugene Stoner is a engineer/craftsman on the level of John Moses Browning and Mikhail Kalashnikov.
The author then posts two pieces of garbage:
"America is absolutely awash with easily obtainable firearms," American-born al-Qaeda spokesman Adam Gadahn said in a video. "You can go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?"
Gadahn was incorrect on one point — fully automatic weapons, which shoot continuously when you hold down the trigger, have been banned since 1986. But he was correct on other the other points: Most states don't require background checks for firearms purchased via private sales at gun shows. Most states don't require showing ID to purchase a firearm from a private seller.
Mr. Gadahn is dead wrong - there are files on the internet that show you how to do full automatic conversions of some guns but if you are caught with one of these conversions, you would be in jail so fast your head would spin. Anyone caught selling these at a gun show would simply disappear. This is an out and out piece of propaganda by the enemy (al-Qaeda has many times publicly declared war on Western civilization) and it designed to spur our own governments to take away our legally owned firearms.
The second paragraph is dead wrong too - the initial legislative push to prohibit the manufacture of new machine guns for civilian purchase started in 1934 with the passing of the National Firearms Act and continued to its current state with the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Please note that it is not in any way illegal for a civilian to own a machine gun as long as it was manufactured prior to 1968. Needless to say, the scarcity of available guns make them worth quite a bit so you are looking at spending about $30K on up to buy one. Many large gun ranges have machine guns that you can rent (here, here, here and here for an example - Google pulls up many more links).
Jeff Bezos owns Amazon. He also owns The Washington Post. He needs to make sure that his employees get their facts straight before publication. Articles like this show so much bias that they are shameful.
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