Above you will hear Kerry Picket say something equivalent to "Clinton's DOJ "found out" that the type of weapons banned by the assault weapon law were not the types of guns being used in violent crimes." I've listened to it three times, but cannot repeat it more as my old computer tends to stall out rapidly under video viewing and I have terrible delay problems already.
I am not up on all weapons and their parts and what are assault weapons or what were defined as such by the Brady Bill, but I'd like to ask if no AKs were ever used in crime, or were they not banned by the bill, or was Ice Tea just fronting when he rapped about them?
But Ms. Pickets statements are obviously so misleading that in essence she is lying (which is probably why she is stuttering so badly in this video. She was sent out to get lies passed on a national show. Some people are not as smooth as the big liars that no one wants to listen to anymore and so they tend to stutter when they play the same right wing game of lying on national television when the host and others can't run to their computers and look things up or otherwise sit and think about what she said and figure out how she's twisted the truth.
But, even if Kerry Picket (@kerrypicket on Twitter) was telling the truth she was cutting it so thin that it wouldn't make an adequate sandwich for a toddler. Possibly the banned guns weren't used in crimes (though she should talk to the LAPD out here who constantly are claiming to be taking banned guns used in crimes off the street).
Maybe, the truth is that once the currently banned guns were against the law, new ones were developed that were even more dangerous, as appears to have happened.
Then what should we have done? We should have banned the new, more dangerous guns, but something happened.
The GOP realized there was a desperate interest group in the US who depended on buying, trading, and selling guns to fill their wallets and assuage their fears. The GOP also realized they could use this group to gain votes that they could sell to fat cats who wanted tax cuts for the wealthy and more wars to grab other nations' resources at little expense to themselves. So they started wailing about how the Democrats were going to ban guns and that would leave gun buyers at the mercy of those "dark people" or "Commies". I believe it was Ronald Reagan who actually posited that Soviet Russia might come up at us through Nicaragua. Within 4 years of his leaving the White House though, of course, the Soviet Union collapsed due to it's over extension in expansionist wars, a line we started heading towards when the GOP got control in 2001 and is still trying to get back to.
So, while gun manufacturers were creating more powerful guns and bigger clips the GOP enforced a ban on banning them and refused to even renew the now whimpy and ineffective Brady bill.
But plenty of deaths have been caused by the rejiggered assault weapons and assault level cartridges. After the Virginia Tech massacre people were crying out for banning the sell of large capacity magazines, but the GOP stood in the way. Even before people had worried about them, but they were used over and over again. After the shooting of US Representative Gabby Giffords, and the killing of many others including a Federal District judge and a sweet nine year old girl the cries reached a crescendo, yet the GOP sits back and laughs, and keeps promoting racism and gun ownership.
Most of the mass killings in the last 20 years were done by firearms defined by the moniker "assault weapons" from the Columbine killings, to Fort Hood, to Tucson. Josh Sugarman noted just 10 at the Huffington Post, but there have been so many others, the Colorado killings at a missionary school and a mega church, shootings at other schools and shopping centers. Law Enforcement officers agree that without assault weapons people just can't be killed so quickly. And please don't ignore that we have filled Mexico with so many assault weapons that it is rapidly becoming a failed state, and a place of death and mayhem.
After jsut about everyone of the mass killings in the US, people cry out that the killer just couldn't have murdered so many if there was proper action on banning assault weapons, not just renewing the Brady bill, but keeping up with the new ways that weapons manufacturers push more death out the door to their customers.
Next time it might be someone you love that is killed by a random stranger, an ex, or someone convinced that "minorities" or "the majority" have it coming to them and pick up an assault weapon to set things "straight".
Vote for those who will listen to us about our concerns on the wild availability of assault weapons. Elect people who will not only ban what is available now, but keep up with new designs that skirt the law.
