Kerry Removes Mask As Gun Ban Sunsets
October 1, 2004

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

The Democrats began their masquerade last year when Americans for Gun Safety (AGS) and key Democrat planners developed a strategy to finesse the single-issue gun rights voter.

They realized the gun issue—particularly the 1993 Brady Act and the 1994 gun ban enacted under President Bill Clinton—had cost them control of Congress in the 1994 congressional elections and the White House in 2000.

While the anti-gunners tried to convince the Democrats that they had nothing to fear from the gun issue, party leaders knew otherwise. President Clinton himself told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1995 that the gun ban had cost his party about two dozen seats in Congress. More recently, in his book My Life, Clinton repeated his assessment of the political costs of that vote.

He should know. He was the man who personally jaw-boned the last two votes to pass a ban that would otherwise have failed in the House. He and his anti-gun friends also had compromised to win the last few votes by accepting the sunset provision.

Now it is 10 years later and the ban, which was always predicated on a hoax, has expired, and the Democrats are still trying to regain control of Congress and the White House.

But some Democrats still haven’t got the whole message.

Kerry Charade
As early as the Iowa caucuses in January, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts adopted the new AGS “low carb gun control” approach. He said he was a hunter, that he supported the Second Amendment while also supporting a renewal and expansion of the Clinton gun ban and restrictions on private sales at gun shows and matches.

In March, Kerry and his then prospective running mate, Sen. John Edwards of South Carolina, abandoned the campaign trail to vote specifically against gun rights and the gun industry. But he went back to the campaign trail professing his support for the Second Amendment and exploiting photo ops to show himself holding guns, or shooting.

But when the gigantic hoax that was the Clinton ban on those firearms that had been dubbed “semi-automatic assault weapons” and full capacity magazines expired, Kerry was forced to remove his mask. The Halloween hunter was unmasked. Suddenly, Sarah Brady, the gun control poster child since 1981 who had been an iconic presence at the 1992, 1996 and 2000 Democratic presidential conventions, but conspicuously absent from in Boston in 2004, appeared by his side.

As the ban expired, Kerry accused President Bush of ducking his responsibility to protect the country from crime and terrorism by allowing the “assault weapons” ban to expire. He made his support for the gun ban a key issue in his bid for the White House, and Sarah Brady was by his side. Gone were the shotguns and the hunting vests of former campaign publicity. Gone was the AGS strategy of “gun control light.” Back in clear view was Sarah Brady and the specter of more and more senseless intrusion on the rights of law-abiding gunowners.

And Kerry rhetoric tracked the falsehoods of the anti-gunners.

“Today George Bush made the job of terrorists easier and made the job of America’s law enforcement officers harder and that’s just plain wrong,” Kerry told a Washington audience.

Kerry said, “George Bush made a choice today. He chose his powerful friends in the gun lobby over the police officers and the families he promised to protect.”
Hoax Continues

While Kerry may have removed his mask, he did not abandon the fiction which he, his friends in the media, Sarah Brady and the Violence Policy Center (VPC) had perpetrated on the American public.

The whole “assault weapon” strategy was formulated by Josh Sugarmann of the VPC in 1988, before the 1989 Stockton, CA, schoolyard massacre. It was fueled by evidence that the media either didn’t know or didn’t want the public to know the difference between true assault weapons regulated under the National Firearms Act and look-alikes that functioned no differently than rifles and shotguns in common use for over 100 years. Before Sugarman, Newsweek and other publications as well as television networks were playing bait and switch. They showed full automatics while talking about semi-automatics.

Sugarmann’s 1988 strategy paper summarized the issue for gun banners who were tired of making little headway on banning handguns.

“The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machineguns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machinegun is assumed to be a machinegun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons,” Sugarmann wrote.

And that’s at the core of the current polling showing a majority of the public still in favor of re-authorizing the ban.

This support is further fueled by a continuous barrage of anti-gun lies. Their statements, ads and billboards threaten the public with a new and dangerous deluge of Uzis, AK-47s and Mac-10s, not only on the streets of America but in its schools. Ceasefire Maryland said, “Assault weapons set to flood US market.”

Balderdash
That’s nonsense. The ban never took a single gun off the streets. The guns that were in private possession or on dealer shelves never were abandoned. The over 10-round magazines that had been made before the ban were still in the marketplace—although the prices were higher.

Guns that functioned exactly like the banned guns were in continuous manufacture throughout the ban, only some of the cosmetic features that frightened the anti-gunners were removed. But the guns were the same. The magazines were still available.

As the ban expired, USA Today reported that “some gun shops see business jump after ban’s end.” But The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “No rush on gun shops after assault-weapons ban lapses.”

Among major newspapers, The Union Leader of Manchester, NH, was most on point when it said that an “ineffective, feel-good law expires today.”

When New York state and others were pushing to emulate the 1989 California “assault weapons” ban, New York Post Albany correspondent Fredric Dicker reported that state statistics showed the guns were far from the danger the anti-gunners claimed. He reported then that a New Yorker was six times more likely to be beaten to death than killed by one of the “assault weapons.”

On Sept. 20, Dicker again reported “The truth about assault rifle statistics.

Dicker wrote: “New Yorkers are at least four times as likely to be punched to death than to be killed with an assault-style rifle, unpublished state crime statistics show.

“The eye-opening figures—obtained by The Post from the state Division of Criminal Justice Services—reveal that New Yorkers are also at least twice as likely to be clubbed to death than shot dead by an attacker wielding one of the semi-automatic rifles previously covered by a federal government ban that expired last week.

“The most recent statewide statistics—murder-by-weapon-type figures from 2002—also show that New Yorkers are at least five times as likely to be stabbed to death with a knife than they are to be shot with an assault rifle.

“Of 893 murders committed two years ago, just 22—or slightly over 2%—were carried out using some form of rifle, including assault-rifles, the figures show.”

As Dicker’s numbers show, there never was a need for the ban. It didn’t change anything. And renewing it will accomplish nothing new, even with Kerry’s enhancements.