Most Sweeping Gun Ban Ever Hits Congress

[rick_reno]

http://www.nraila.org/LegislativeUpdate.asp?FormMode=Detail&ID=644

Most Sweeping Gun Ban Ever Hits Congress


Clinton Ban "Re-enactment" Targets Millions More Guns!!!
As we predicted, the anti-gunners have begun the push to further expand the Clinton gun ban of 1994. Not content with merely re-authorizing the ban, Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.) have drafted legislation that bans millions more guns! It's a giant step closer to the goal stated by Clinton ban sponsor Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who said on CBS's 60 Minutes: "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them, Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in, I would have done it." Toward that goal, Conyers/McCarthy would:


Ban every gun made to lawfully comply with the Clinton ban. The Clinton ban arbitrarily dictated the kinds of grips, stocks and attachments that new guns could have. Manufacturers complied. New guns were made to conform to the Clinton restrictions. Now prohibitionists want to ban the new guns, too.

Ban guns the Clinton legislation expressly exempted from prohibition. This includes Ruger Mini-14s, Ranch Rifles, and .30 Caliber Carbines, and entire classes of guns, including fixed magazine rifles, as well as shotguns that hold under five rounds.

Ban guns widely used for target shooting. It bans the three center-fire rifles most commonly used for marksmanship competitions: the Colt AR-15, the Springfield M1A, and the M1 "Garand."

Ban all semi-automatic shotguns: Remingtons, Winchesters, Benellis, Berettas, etc., widely used for hunting, trap, skeet, and sporting clays, by banning their receivers (main component).

Ban guns for defense. Bans any semi-automatic rifle or shotgun any U.S. Attorney General one day claims is not "sporting," even though self-defense is a fundamental right and the federal constitution, the constitutions of 44 states, and the laws of all 50 states recognize the right to use guns for defense.


Ban 68 named guns (Clinton ban named 19 guns); Ban parts used to repair or refurbish guns, including frames or receivers; Ban importation of ammunition magazines exempt under Clinton ban; Ban private sales of millions of guns, their frames and receivers, and their parts; Ban semi-automatic rifles under 30" long (useful for home defense); Ban all semi-automatic rifles that can hold more than 10 rounds.


Ban guns rarely used in crime. State and local law enforcement agency reports have always shown that guns on the Clinton and Conyers/McCarthy ban lists have never been used in more than a small percentage of violent crime. The Congressionally-mandated study of the Clinton law concluded that guns it banned "were never used in more than a fraction of all gun murders." But even if they were, are the rights and liberties of law-abiding citizens to be dictated by the acts of criminals?


Begin "backdoor" registration. Requires manufacturers of banned guns, frames, receivers, and parts to report the names of their dealers, and requires dealers to report any of those parts they have in stock. The next step is obvious-demanding the names of gun owners who buy those parts.

Please contact your U.S. Representative at (202) 224-3121 or by using the "Write Your Representatives" feature and urge them to oppose any attempt to keep alive the Clinton gun ban.

 

[Telperion]

Here's the full text of the House bill, H.R.2038:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.2038:

 

[Mizzoutiger]

Great News

Let those Rats get a little overzealous. The bill will spontaneously combust. President Bush may be counting on never having to see an AWB bill. At least, that's how I hope it goes down.

 

[Mark Tyson]

It looks to me as if our enemies are really overplaying their hand this time. Maybe a simple reauthorization of the original bill would have been harder to oppose. Could there be a silver lining to this atrocious legislation?

 

[Sven]

This is going to invoke pure rage from all red-blooded Americans.

Time for an inquisition against the infidels who are supposedly 'representing' the people of America.

 

[Mark Tyson]

Consider my rage invoked, Sven.

 

[Justin]

Keep in mind that they may have made this thing deliberately over-the-top in the hopes of letting some of the more onerous parts being bargained away. You could chip away a lot of that law and still have something worse than what was passed in 1994. Notice the bit about removing the sunset clause?

Call your representatives and congressthings. Do it now.

If any of your reps are listed on the following link, it's even more important that you contact them. This is the list of House members in the Judiciary Committee. The one that this thing has to go through first:
http://www.house.gov/judiciary/members.htm

 

[Pendragon]

LOL.

There could hardly be a time when this bill is less likely to get any traction.

This is all about posturing and playing to their constituents.

No worries.

 

[44Brent]

Military style "Assault Vehicles"

I would like to suggest that the bill be amended to ban military style "Assault Vehicles", specifically the Hummer. Hummers can be used to run over hundreds of kids on school grounds. There is absolutely no reason that anyone NEEDS a Hummer.

 

[MeekandMild]

How about MREs? Dangerous assault beans!

Seriously I wonder how much chance this could be a ploy to jump start the economy? The Dems torpedoed the stock marked in 2000, hoping that Bush would sink with it if he got elected. Since then they blocked every effort at any reasonable tax reform.

Now they remember the gun rush of the early Clinton years and see the chance to influence a hundred million people to rush out and spend a thousand or two bucks apiece on durable consumer goods. Imagine what the economy would look like if everyone bought two dream guns. 2x1500x$100,000,000 equals $300,000,000,000!

 

[Al Norris]

Regardless of the whys and wherefors of either of the two bans, I have written the following to be mailed to my congress critters:

To The Honorable _____________

I am writing this letter to you to let you know that I am not only against the re-introduced Bill to extend and make permanmant the Assault Weapon Ban of 1994, S.1034 by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), but also the Assault Weapons Ban and Law Enforcement Protection Act of 2003, HR 2038 by Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.).

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a clear and concise meaning that all citizens of this nation have the right to keep and bear arms. All recent scholarship on the subject agree that this is an individual right. Furhter, the 5th Circuit Court of the U.S. recently upheld this right.

One of the most jealously guarded rights we, as citizens, have is the right to our lives. The right to defend ourselves and our families is fundamental to that right. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms is about that, but more importantly, it is about the right to defend ourselves against a runaway government. This is established fact. In U.S. v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), which is the only case the Supreme Court has taken the opportunity to visit the Second Amendment solely for the purposes of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. The Court devised a test by which to measure the constitutionality of statutes relating to firearms:

"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense."

Thus, for the keeping and bearing of a firearm to be constitutionally protected, the firearm should be a militia-type arm.

Every single weapon under the current ban as well as every weapon under HR 2038 is explicitly a militia type weapon, including the Normal Capacity Ammunition Feeding Devices that are currently labled as High Capacity Ammunition Feeding Devices and are therefore of legal usage under the Miller test. Further, labling any semi-automatic weapon as an assault weapon is certainly a misnomer as every assault weapon in the armory of the U.S. Armed Forces are select fire weapons, that is, they are capable of fully automatic fire.

The nature of the weapons selected for the current ban on so-called assault weapons appears to be completely arbitrary and wholly cosmetic in nature.

In conclusion, any Senator or Representative of the Great State of Idaho who votes for either of these Bills will not receive my vote upon the next election. Further, I will do whatever I must, to convince everyone I know to vote against you, should you so vote in favor of either of these two Bills.

Signed,

I suggest all of you do the same. Use this one, or write your own.

[edited to correct spelling]

 

[AZTOY]

Ban all semi-automatic shotguns: Remingtons, Winchesters, Benellis, Berettas, etc., widely used for hunting, trap, skeet, and sporting clays, by banning their receivers (main component).

I hope the hunters are starting to wake up:banghead: :banghead:

 

[whitebear]

Al, a quick heads-up...

you might want to run the spell checker on your message before you send it. Assault is misspelled in the second line of the first paragraph.

No offense intended! A very powerful, well-written letter!

 

[Waitone]

Before campaigning starts for presidential elections it is common for each side to firm up support in its base. The Democrats' base includes rabid gun haters. This legislation is merely an attempt to convince Democrats to support them.

It is also a measure of its view of the future. Looks to me like panic is setting in. Here we have an issue which some in the Democrat party credit with losing them the 2000 election; gun control. So now they tune up for 2004 and how do they do it? Why by dropping any pretense and pose an outright ban on firearms. Now if they lost an election by a narrow margin due to gun rights in a few states, please tell me what they stand to gain by doing precisely what pro-RKBA supports have said all along they want to do, confiscate all guns. This legislation is designed to mobilize anyone remotely concerned with RKBA anywhere in the US.

Democrats have either lost any semblence of rationality in politics or they've consulted the crystal ball and just peered into the political abyss.

 

[Al Norris]

Done! Thanks whitebear.

 

[gun-fucious]

ya mean Ruger is getting its mini 14 banned after all ole Billy R did during the first go round?

whodathunkit?

 

[whoami]

Just for my own clarification, as my mind is too fried to interpret legalese right now, section 4 seems to me to modify the grandfather provision to read:

(v)
(1) It shall be unlawful for a person to manufacture, transfer,
or possess a semiautomatic assault weapon.

(2)
(A) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to the possession or
transfer of any semiautomatic assault weapon
otherwise lawfully possessed under Federal law as of
September 13, 1994
(B) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to any firearm the
possession or transfer of which would (but for this
subparagraph) be unlawful by reason of this
subsection, and which is otherwise lawfully possessed
on the date of the enactment of this subparagraph.'.


Now....what do they mean by subsection? Do they mean subsection as in (v), or the whole of 922? Does this basically extend the grandfathering, or does it make what we'd call post-bans illegal?

 

[Greg L]

One more Al

2nd para: "Furhter, the 5th Circuit Court of the U.S. recently upheld this right." Further.

Otherwise a great letter. I plan on filing off the serial #s and faxing it off. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Greg

 

[Al Norris]

Oh just Crap! :banghead:

OK, you folks find the spelling errors and fix them in your drafts! I'll import the thing into Word and fix it on my end!

It probably wouldn't hurt to add something about why Bush Sr and Gore lost and who it was that voted against them...but as it is, using a 12 point Times New Roman font, the letter is exactly 1 page. I don't suspect a multipage letter would be as well received as a single page source.

 

[Preacherman]

You could switch to 11-point or 10-point and write a novel...

 

[Pinned&Recessed]

(A) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to the possession or
transfer of any semiautomatic assault weapon
otherwise lawfully possessed under Federal law as of
September 13, 1994
(B) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to any firearm the
possession or transfer of which would (but for this
subparagraph) be unlawful by reason of this
subsection, and which is otherwise lawfully possessed
on the date of the enactment of this subparagraph.

I take this to mean that the current Pre-Bans are still grandfathered as prebans, and Post-Bans are grandfathered as Post-Bans. So there would be 4 classes of "Assault Weapons": True Pre-Bans, "Pre-Ban" Post-Bans, LEO only from the '94 ban and Totally Illegal AWs.

Basically, the law says that you can only possess a AW which was "Lawfully" possessed on that date the law was passed. So, could you "Lawfully" possess a Post-Ban AR with a Flash Suppressor or Bayo Lug when the new law would pass? No. Could you possess a LEO AW on that date of the new law? No, so therefore, the only way for your Post-Ban to remain legal is to leave it in it's Post-Ban state and the current Post-Ban AWs would not become available. It would also be illegal to modify a Post-Ban, despite the fact that every AW becomes "Pre-Ban".

I'm pretty sure that's what they're going for.

I hope this makes sense.

 

[BowStreetRunner]

I think McCarthy and Conyers are taking lessons in sheeple control from Mao and Stalin....sheesh
that bill goes beyond unconstitutional.......its straight oopression
BSR

 

[Standing Wolf]

Leftists are moral and intellectual parasites who'd be happier in communist China.

 

[Brett Bellmore]

Waitone,

"It is also a measure of its view of the future. Looks to me like panic is setting in. Here we have an issue which some in the Democrat party credit with losing them the 2000 election; gun control. So now they tune up for 2004 and how do they do it? Why by dropping any pretense and pose an outright ban on firearms. Now if they lost an election by a narrow margin due to gun rights in a few states, please tell me what they stand to gain by doing precisely what pro-RKBA supports have said all along they want to do, confiscate all guns. This legislation is designed to mobilize anyone remotely concerned with RKBA anywhere in the US.

Democrats have either lost any semblence of rationality in politics or they've consulted the crystal ball and just peered into the political abyss."

I figure it's like this: While supporting gun control (more than Bush did...) lost Gore the election, and cost a few marginal Dems their seats, a lot of the remaining Democrats are from loony bin districts where frothing at the mouth actually helps you get elected. The only threat they face is in the primary, from the left. They've got to beat back that threat, even at the cost of making life harder for their comrades in saner districts.

The Presidential race doesn't even figure into their calculations, they've probably written 2004 off. At any rate, they're not going to cut their throats in the primaries just to help whoever gets picked to run against Bush.

You'll notice that the really nasty extension bill is in the House. That's because the House Dems have small districts dominated by big city machines. The Senate Democrats won't touch the more extreme version, because they have to carry whole states to win, not just city centers. {Granted, they generally do that by winning big enough in the city centers to make up for losing everywhere else, but there's a limit to how badly they can afford to lose outside the cities; Getting 120% of the inner city vote looks bad...}

If the Dems lose more seats in 2004, once again it will be because they lost the marginal seats where they have to at least seem to be sane. In that case, look for the remaining House Dems to be even crazier on average. Eventually they'll get reduced to just the Black caucus, who'll be introducing bills to have us rounded up into camps and executed.

 

[Oleg Volk]

One way to combat this is to take new folks to the range and explain to them that, once the bill becomes law, they won't be able to enjoy the toys they just enjoyed using anymore.