Letters: Assault weapons and crime
Re “Americans and their guns,†Editorial, March 21
You are correct: There will be another atrocity. But it won’t be because people are allowed assault weapons or guns with more than 10 rounds, or because not every gun owner goes through a background check. According to the FBI, about 2.5% of all murders in the U.S. in 2011 were committed with rifles, including so-called assault weapons.
According to a National Rifle Assn. official who met with Joe Biden, the vice president said the government doesn’t have enough time to prosecute everyone who lies on background check forms. So how will more checks improve anything?
Many police officers carry handguns with 15-round magazines. Why should these “trained experts†need that many shots when civilians confronted with multiple attackers may be limited to 10?
An atrocity will come because some crazed person decides to kill, not because law-abiding people aren’t having their rights restricted.
Robert Braley
Bakersfield
I have gone hunting many times with several different people and for different animals. Not one of those hunters brought an assault weapons or needed a clip of more than five bullets.
I have never heard anyone ask someone from the National Rifle Assn. to say if he has gone hunting with an assault weapons or a high-capacity magazine. Why?
Tommy Randle
San Dimas
Constitutional law according to The Times’ editorial board: If the majority of participants in a poll wants a law infringing a right the U.S. Constitution says shall not be infringed, then that is what Congress should give them.
Does this mean that if a poll found a majority wants a law banning late-term abortions, prohibiting same-sex marriage or establishing Christianity as the official religion of the United States, then you would support all of those things too?
Robert A. Philipson
Los Angeles
The rights given in the Constitution should be applied equally.
Whatever rights of gun ownership that are in the 2nd Amendment should not be greater than the rights in the 1st Amendment, particularly “the right of the people peaceably to assemble.†Yet the rights of peaceable assemblies in elementary schools, universities, workplaces, theaters and elsewhere are threatened by gun violence.
We are loosing the right to meet in public because some feel there are overriding rights to own weapons of mass destruction.
Matthew Hetz
Los Angeles
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