Letter to | the Editor

To the Editor:

It’s amusing to watch the gun control advocates work. When the Brady Bill was being considered, the gun control advocates said that was all they wanted, but the ink wasn’t even dry on the bill and they were back demanding more controls. Now they’re demanding still more controls.

Perhaps it might be more effective if they concentrated more on criminal control than gun control, although, as the late Senator Howard Metzenbaum commented rather angrily in a debate over 25 years ago, “It’s not about criminals, it’s about guns.”

The gun controllers’ terminology is interesting, too. If one has a semi-automatic rifle, it’s a “deadly assault weapon,” suitable only for shooting children in school yards, and if it’s a single-shot bolt action rifle it’s a “deadly sniper rifle,” suitable only for shooting children in school yards; note that the main difference between an ordinary hunting rifle and the “deadly sniper rifle” is the target. If one has a small pistol, it’s a “Saturday Night Special,” and if one has a slightly larger pistol it’s “the preferred weapon of drug dealers” (never mind that only about 10 percent of drug dealers use them). The language is twisted to make gun ownership seem evil, and there are people in cities that go into a gibbering panic if they find out that anyone within half a mile owns a gun of any kind.

Gun owners and people who believe that the Second Amendment means what it says can’t win because the language is biased against them by the media.

The gun controllers are all upset about the AR-15 rifle. I should note that the AR in AR-15 stands for “Armalite Rifle,” not “automatic rifle” as some claim, and the AR-15 was first made by Armalite over 50 years ago. I carried one briefly at Da Nang (Vietnam) in 1965 (I never fired it, but I did qualify with the weapon on a range before I went to Vietnam). If memory serves – and it’s been over 50 years – the military version of the weapon can fire in automatic mode (it has a lever that switches from semi-automatic to automatic), but the civilian version of it cannot; I’ve never had any desire to own one.

As a practical matter, automatic weapons – especially the military AR-15 and its successors – are wasteful and inaccurate. I refer to them as “bullet hoses. “ In automatic mode the military AR-15 will empty its magazine in about a second and probably won’t hit anything – and then it’s an expensive club.

Robert Ackley

Emerson