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ABC has been sensationalizing the expiration of the AWB and did a story based almost entirely on lies on ABC News last night. Here was my responce.

This was one of the most biased stories I've ever seen on ABC. Bill Retecker (sp?) has sunk to new journalistic lows. The most glaring example of his bias was using the North Hollywood shooting as an example of what so-called "assault weapons" are capable of. The two AK-47s used in that bank robbery were illegally obtained machine guns, not semi-automatic replicas of AK-47s.

Machine guns are regulated under the 1932 National Firearms Act and the 1968 Gun Control Act, not the 1994 Crime Prevention Law, which regulates certain features of semi-automatic only firearms. The importation and manufacture of new machine guns was banned by President Reagan in 1986. The machine guns that the bank robbers used in the North Hollywood bank shoot out violated all three of these laws. If anything, the footage that ABC used in this report illustrates why gun control doesn't work. 70% of all firearms used in crimes were obtained illegally.

Even before the '94 ban on so-called "assault weapons" (the military defines an assualt rifle as a shoulder fired weapon of an intermediate caliber capable of full automatic or burst fire, i.e. a machine gun), semi-automatic rifles similar in appearance to military rifles were used in well under 1% of all gun crimes. In 1996, the DoJ study that Congress required to evaluate the effects of the ban found that the ban had absolutely no effect on reducing crimes, and that the use of "assault weapons" in crimes had gone up marginally, although still well below 1%.

Even the Violence Policy Center, which is the main champion of the '94 ban, has admitted that the ban has had no effect on crime. Rather, they state, that the goal of the ban is get the American public to accept the general idea of gun control to further their aim of eliminating private gun ownership altogether. Misleading stories by ABC only furthers this deliberate attempt to hoodwink the American public into accepting the erosion of their Second Amendment Rights.

While no right is absolute, it has long been held in constitutional law that there must be an over riding public interest that needs to be protected in order to justify any infringement on our civil liberties. The classic example are laws against shouting "fire" in a crowded theater ballanced against our First Amendment rights. The government's own studies and data show that their is no case for the '94 ban.

Here's a link to ABC's discussion forum. Its heartening to see that their are three pages of threads that all denounce ABC's propaganda campaign.

http://forums.go.com/abcnews/forum?byThread=true&start=25&forumID=36

and my post on another thread

http://forums.go.com/abcnews/thread?threadID=28075

 

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Well, on Firday, Peter Jennings offered a retraction with regards to the North Hollywood video and a clarification that machine guns would not be deregulatied by the AWB's sunsetting, "as one of our viewers pointed out." :wink: 8) I e-mailed a couple of more corrections and some general comments, but their online discussion forum was already choked with comments about the inncacuracy of their reporting and general comments about how stupid the ban is. Tonight, ABC did a much more balanced story that called into question the whole need for the ban in the first place and how inefective it has been. Still, not as pro-gun as the previous stories had been anti-gun, but at least an even handed story showing both sides, and the other side sounded stupid in the face of the facts they presented. Chalk one up for all of those that bothered to respond on ABC's forum and point out the error of their ways. My wife noted that they had a different reporter, too, and wondered if the other guy had been canned or at least reprimanded.

 

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Both Sunday and Monday night, they did segments that called into question whether or not the ban was effective at all. They pointed out that high cap mags were still available, just not newly produced ones, and that other than some cosmetiic differences, there was no real difference between pre-ban and post-ban, or now post-post-ban guns. They even had a clip of one of the VPC idiots admitting that the ban was completely ineffective, "but it needs to be renewed anyway" without any explaination as to why. Dan Rather commented that most owners of "assualt weapons" use them for target shooting or simply for collecting. Of course, now that the ban is dead, we have to keep the pressure on so that they don't back slide into spreading their lies and propoganda to try and renew the ban.