Once again in your editorial ("Congress' bad aim on guns," March 24), you make assumptions, based on polls, claiming that Americans are strongly in favor of new gun control laws.
You should know as well as anyone that polls sample a tiny percentage of the nation's people and are easily biased. You hold the NY SAFE Act as a model for what the federal government should do, yet the SAFE Act is poorly written and was passed late at night.
You go on the usual rant about the nation's founders never foreseeing modern weaponry like so-called "assault weapons." Let's make this clear: An assault rifle is by definition a selective fire or fully automatic weapon used by the military. The National Firearms Act in 1934 placed limits on the purchase and sale of fully automatic weapons, making assault rifles essentially illegal nine years before the first ones appeared during World War II. To gun opponents and the media, any thing that looks like an assault rifle must therefore be an assault rifle.
All the SAFE Act did was make instant criminals out of thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens for possession of certain rifles, pistols and high-capacity magazines that were legal before the act was signed. All these types of laws are merely feel-good legislation that will have no effect on crime, especially considering rifles are used in less than 2 percent of crimes nationwide. I don't even care for these rifles myself, but I support the right of others to own and enjoy them.
Mark Brady
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