Ar-15s and Ak-47s are not the problem

I’ve been paying very close attention to the Second Amendment debate raging in the public forum across this nation recently. There seems to be a commonality in all the discussion and debates emanating from the control side. That commonality is the lack of actual facts, statistics, and meaningful thought in the arguments.

English pundit Piers Morgan likes to bring up that AR-15s were used in Clackamas, Aurora and Sandy Hook. While he is correct, he implies that AR-15s are the weapon of choice for mass murderers. Not so, Thomas Hamilton, the perpetrator of the infamous 1996 Dunblane massacre in England (which prompted the UK’s very restrictive rifle and pistol ban) only used pistols, half of which were 6-shot revolvers.

Charles Whitman, a former Marine, killed 14 people from a bell tower at the University of Texas in 1966 with a Remington 700 deer rifle. I have that same hunting rifle at home. Timothy McVeigh, using common products easily found, blew up the Murrah Building and killed over 100 people in Oklahoma City. In Apeldoorn, Netherlands, a Dutchman killed 5 people by plowing his car a high speed into a parade. None of these cowards used AR-15s, AK-47s, rifle magazines holding 10 or more rounds, or any sort of scary tactical features currently included in Feinstein's proposed ban.

Furthermore, it can be seen that, from FBI crime statistics, that rifles account for only 2.7% of total murders in the US from 2007 to 2011. Since the FBI doesn’t further breakdown the type of rifle used, it cannot be known how many of the rifles used were semi-automatic or similar to an AR-15, but it can be safely assumed that not all of them were.

More striking is the fact that more people were killed with blunt objects alone, knives alone, or personal weapons alone (defined as feet, hands, etc) than by rifles between 2007 and 2011. These statistics do not come from the NRA, but from the FBI. It cannot be claimed that the statistics are biased towards a Second Amendment defense.

It is ridiculous, as Morgan, and many others suggest, to severely regulate or ban millions of pieces of property owned by millions of law-abiding Americans just because two or three psychopathic cowards used them in recent events.

As President Obama and others in his party use the death of children to further their agenda, we must look beyond the rhetoric and emotional arguments using children’s tears and look at the facts.

As the amount of firearms has increased and the number of firearm laws decreased in the past years, FBI stats show that the total number of murders has declined (by 15% from 2007 to 2011). What has increased, however, has been the perception of the frequency of gun crime as portrayed by certain media and political figures.

There has been an appearance of an increase in gun crime, while, in reality, it has been declining despite rises in the number of firearms and in population.

It is my hope that the nation will not get caught in the stream of demagoguery and will pause to look at the facts behind firearms in the United States.