Mother’s Day Rallies Are Over But Antis Plan Nationwide Tour
June 1, 2004

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The “Million” Mom March (MMM) 2004 rally in Washington, DC, is over, but the anti-gun campaign to extend and expand the 1994 Clinton gun and magazine ban is not.

Now you’ll have to be on the lookout for the anti-gun crowd’s 26-foot pink recreational vehicle that is scheduled to stop in dozens of cities across the country after its inaugural stop in Philadelphia on May 13. The tour is supposed to cover at least 20 states and include stops at the Democrat and Republican national conventions, the MMM announced.

“America doesn’t want to turn back the clock, and see these reckless killing machines return to our streets just as our children are going back to school,” said Shikha Hamilton, national spokeswoman for the MMM. “President Bush has the power to save the assault weapons ban. All he has to do is pick up the phone.”

It’s up to Congress to renew the gun ban, and although President Bush has indicated he supports renewal, he has not discussed it or pressured Congress to act. And that’s what the entire coalition of anti-gun activists is trying to force him to do before Sept. 13.

“There are 127 days left, beginning today (May 9), before the assault weapons ban expires. There are only about 50 legislative days left, when Congress can receive President Bush’s clear call for action on renewal,” said Michael Barnes, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and its “Million” Mom satellite.

“We will not rest. We will do everything we can to ensure that all Americans are aware of this deadline. There are literally lives hanging in the balance.”

The “Big Pink Rig,” as the MMM call it, is scheduled to visit: Richmond, VA; Raleigh, NC; St. Louis, MO; Minneapolis, MN; Milwaukee, WI; Cleveland, OH; Philadelphia, PA; Pittsburgh, PA; Portland, ME; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Detroit, MI; Denver, CO; Albuquerque, NM; Phoenix, AZ; Portland, OR, and Seattle, WA. You might also see it in California, New Hampshire, Indiana, Illinois and other states as well.

And you can expect more of the classic anti-gun double-speak as well.

Reader’s Letter
Gun Week reader Brain H. Harms of North Tonawanda, NY, called my attention to an Associated Press (AP) report on the Mother’s Day Momsers that has some classic examples of anti-gun jargon and irrationality.

The AP report by Kata Kertesz, filed the day after the rally, included some quotes from anti-gun speakers, one of which really got Harms’ attention.

Speakers at the MMM’s “Halt the Assault” rally reminded the crowd to “Remember November!” as they spoke mainly of a need to renew a ban on assault rifles that is to expire Sept. 13, Kertesz reported.

“We are working very hard in Iraq to get AK-47s off the street, to get Uzis off the streets. The president says we’re fighting the war on terror by doing that,” she quoted Rep. Chris van Hollen (D-MD). “What about the terror right here on our streets at home.”

Then Kertesz continued: “He also decried a provision in the law that critics contend allows owners of legal firearms to replace the housing for the firing mechanism and turn them into illegal assault weapons.” He tied the loophole to October 2002 sniper attacks that killed 10 people in van Hollen’s Maryland district, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

“We need to close that loophole, because real bullets that killed real people went through those loopholes,” van Hollen said, according to the AP report.

That’s what got Harms’ attention.

“I found the comments by Rep. Chris van Hollen of Maryland particularly ridiculous and offensive,” Harms wrote Gun Week.

“And I would really like to see the provision in the law that allows firearm owners to alter our ‘semi-auto’ to ‘full auto’ by replacing the ‘housing??’ for the ‘firing mechanism??’

“What the heck is this housing? And what did it have to do with the DC snipers,” Harms asked.

He also went on to note:

“As I remember it was the Brady group and AGS (Americans for Gun Safety) that showed the parts and mechanics as well as the actual process of converting a legal, semi-automatic firearm to an illegal one on a public TV show.”

Harms’ letter goes on to suggest that Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY), another speaker at the MMM rally in DC, learn from Texas state Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp and work constructively to support law-abiding citizens in their bid to bring “swift and telling justice” to criminal and insane killers whether or not they use firearms.

Mocking the March
Reporter Susan Jones of CNSNews.com took a different tack in her report on the MMM rally, noting that pro-gun rights people “mocked” the rally, relying heavily on a commentary by John M. Snyder, Washington, DC, representative of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Harms found his AP report in The Buffalo News but not the CNSNews report below.

“It wasn’t a ‘Million Mom March’—it was a ‘thousand gang limp,’ said one Second Amendment supporter, describing Sunday’s anti-gun march in Washington.

“The Washington Post, which ran the story on page B-1, said ‘thousands’ of people, mostly women, marched to ‘end gun violence’ on Sunday.

“The newspaper described the rally as ‘the largest gun-control demonstration in four years,’ then went on to say, ‘The rally lacked star power, and certainly the numbers, of the first Million Mom March in 2000, when hundreds of thousands of women flooded the Mall on Mother’s Day. . . .”

After noting the discrepancy in various reports on the number attending the rally, Jones continued:

“Snyder said the rally showed ‘the good citizens of the United States of America would rather spend Mother’s Day enjoying their time with the mothers of America than wasting it on Brady bunch nonsense.’

“According to Snyder, Sunday’s march ‘drew such a pitiful crowd of supporters that automobile traffic on the bridges crossing the Potomac River from Virginia into Washington, DC, flowed more quickly than normal,’ despite full-page newspaper ads urging gun control supporters to attend the rally.

“Snyder suggested that given the cost of the newspaper ads and the low turnout, Brady Campaign was ‘wasting contributors’ money,’ ” Jones said in her CNSNews report.

Reader Harms put his finger on a key element of the entire “assault weapon” hoax since it was first launched in late 1988 in a Violence Policy Center strategy paper that reminded everyone that the general public didn’t know the difference between a real selective fire assault weapon and a semi-automatic variation of the same design.

This gave birth to a lot of wordsmithing by the anti-gunners and a largely lazy media. “Assault weapon” came to mean anything they said it meant, and it morphed into “semi-automatic assault weapon.”

The law that President Bill Clinton forced through Congress with lots of arm-twisting—not just a call on the phone as the anti-gunners want Bush to make—was written by the anti-gunners. Since they had a hard time defining “assault weapons” by function or mechanical features they relied on cosmetic features alone.

Now they refer to their flawed language as a “loophole,” as Harms points out. What is worse from a standpoint of language or honest politics neither has anything to do with the “Beltway snipers.” Those killers fired in single-shot mode. The fact that the Bushmaster rifle they stole to use for their murders resembles the AR-15 design mentioned in the gun ban has nothing to do with reasoning for renewal of the expiring gun ban.

The law didn’t stop them. It couldn’t and its renewal will not prevent some future repetition of their aberrant behavior.

The anti-gunners know this as well as Harms, you or I, but they don’t care. They were successful in perpetrating a hoax in 1994, and they’re trying to do it again.

That’s really what “Halt the Assault” is all about.