Thank you for contacting me in opposition to reauthorizing the 1994 semi-automatic weapons ban.  I sincerely appreciate hearing your thoughts and want you to know that I strongly agree with you.

I firmly believe the Second Amendment to the Constitution is a crucial guarantee of both a citizen's right to keep and bear arms and, more broadly, of our freedom.  Gun control is not crime control.  I feel the answer is tougher laws against criminal activity.  In order to make our streets and communities safer our focus should be on locking up criminals and stopping criminal behavior, not imposing criminal penalties on law-abiding citizens merely exercising their freedoms to protect their families and property.

The "assault weapons" law is not about fighting crime, rather it is about penalizing the way firearms look.  Gun control supporters have no evidence or police reports that assault weapons are used in a disproportionate percentage of crime.  In other words the "assault weapons" law has had no effect on crime.

The pretense behind this law was to crack down on the amount of criminals who use "assault weapons."  However results from a recent study conducted for the Department of Justice by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan economic and social policy research organization, found that "because the banned guns and magazines were never used in more than a fraction of all guns murders, even the maximum theoretically achievable preventive effects of the ban on gun murders is almost certainly too small to detect."

The study goes on to state that they were unable to detect any reduction in two types of gun murders that are thought to be closely associated with assault weapons, those with multiple victims in a single incident and those producing multiple bullet wounds per victim.  This evidence clearly contradicts the intent of the law and demonstrates the ineffectiveness and unfairness of this unconstitutional ban.

Rest assured that if this legislation comes before Congress for reauthorization I will fight to oppose it.  Once again, thank you for contacting me regarding this important issue, and if I may be of further assistance please do not hesitate to contact me.

 





khd
Sincerely,

David Vitter
Member of Congress

P.S.  Please go to my website at http://vitter.house.gov/contact.asp to sign up for my e-mail newsletter.

***pretty straight forward****

Thats a pretty good answer, now try making frankenstein understand that