NRA President James Porter writes about “the big lie” that Democrats told the American people with regard to “assault weapons”. The NY Times, one of the organizations that helped to spread that lie, published “The Assault Weapon Myth” by Lois Beckett that goes into detail about how the 1994 “assault weapon” ban was built on lies.
In her September 14, 2014, analysis, Lois Beckett of ProPublica accurately dissects what I would prefer to call a serial lie that led to the passage of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s and (then) U.S. Rep. Chuck Shumer’s 1994 “assault weapons” ban. It was, says Beckett, purely political fiction, or as she put it, “… Democrats created and then banned a category of guns they called ‘assault weapons.’” These firearms, she writes “were presented by the media as the gun of choice for drug dealers and criminals and which many in law enforcement wanted to get off the streets.”
None of that was true then, nor is it true today.
And now the anti-freedom crowd wants to walk away from this disaster in search of greener pastures. (“Universal” background checks are their new schtick.) Their attempts to con the public into banning a class of firearms that were never a threat to safety failed in two ways. First, the ban was never popular. The groundswell of support they expected for their side of the argument never materialized. Second, and perhaps worse, the ban made a relatively uncommon class of firearms wildy popular. The AR-15 is now “America’s Gun” in a way that it never was before.
