XDA

The rabid anti-gunners are wailing that there weren't even 40 votes in the Senate for Democrat Sen. Feinstein's "assault weapon" ban, and it has been dropped, probably forever. They use their favorite word to apply to people who disagree with them about how best to combat senseless mass murder, that is, they call them cowards. The gun haters' idea of cowardice is my idea of common sense.

Enter once again the most passionate anti-gunner and quondam sports writer, Mike Lupica, who generally displays stunning ignorance of guns every time he talks about them. He writes:

Any fool knows that Lanza couldn’t possibly have killed as many children as quickly as he did on the morning of Dec. 14 without an assault weapon in his hands.

There is nothing especially rapid about the rate of fire of the AR-15 he used. Every semi auto gun fires as fast as you can pull the trigger. There's no inherent advantage in the gun mechanism because our trigger fingers are slower than those machines. Nor is there anything special about the AR-15's lethality. The two hand guns he carried would have fired just as quickly and would have killed the poor victims just as dead.

I'm not sure why Mr. Lupica is so falsely convinced that there was something especially lethal or rapid about the AR-15. He is just as wrong to blame the normal size, 30 round magazines used, as this is what Wikipedia says:

He reloaded frequently during the shooting, sometimes firing only fifteen rounds from a thirty-round magazine.

So much for stopping gun violence by limiting magazine sizes to 15 rounds. Right, Governor? The shooter got off 152 rounds in between 11 and 14 minutes. That's not a particularly high rate of fire, at worst, 14 per minute, and it would certainly be obtainable with pistols, even with revolvers.

Let's compare some recent mass murders.

The evil psychopath in Norway in 2011, killed 69 and injured 110, 55 seriously, with a Ruger mini 14 and a Glock pistol. Neither of these weapons was counted as an "assault weapon" in Feinstein's bill.

The evil psychopath at Virginia Tech in 2007 killed 32 and wounded 17 (before he self executed) using a Glock and a Walther pistol, not with "assault weapons."

Let's go to the stats:

In 2011, in the United States, there were 12,664 murders and of those 8,853 where the murderer used a gun. Of those, 323 were committed with rifles, not "assault rifles" but all rifles--single shot to bolt action to semi-auto but not mean looking and the mean looking ones. So the number of "assault weapon" rifles used for murder in 2011 is necessarily less than 2.5% of all the murders. Not exactly the most pressing gun violence problem out there.

Lupica, like a dog and his sick, returns to his ignorant misstatement.

Again: Ask any gun owner if Lanza could have killed as many children as he did in as short a time as he did — before he was a sure shot putting a bullet from one of his handguns through his snake-filled brain — if he didn’t have an AR-15 in his hands.

Labels: Gun Moron, Mike Lupica