Closing the hunting rifle loophole.

Hat tip to days of our trailers:

The Violence Policy center has started to go after common hunting rifles. Oleg Volk was one of the many who predicted it:

• "But all we want to ban are assault weapons and Saturday Night Specials," say the gun-grabbers. "Your deer rifle and you pheasant shotgun are safe." They do not tell you that your sniper rifle (formerly known as the deer gun), your big-bore streetsweeper (aka hunting shotgun) and your Dirty Harry death machine (target revolver) are next. When you read or watch news, look out for loaded yet meaningless phrases like cop-killer bullet, deadly automatic high-power assault pistol, and the like. The sound bytes are nonsense once you think about what they really mean, but not everyone questions what the news tell them.

The VPC is moving against "intermedate sniper rifles", you know: bolt action rifles between .22lr and .50 BMG, also known as hunting rifles which were previously considered sporting.

Let's face it: a rifle which can put down a deer, or even a coyote in a consitantly painless manner is almost guaranteed to be able to kill or significantly injure a human. This doesn't change the fact that these weapons are vastly under-represented in the guns used by criminals lineup.
Run a search on my blog (search engine to your right) and look up "guns used in crime", you should find the study by the departement of justice as well as my take on the matter.

Hunting rifles are highly prevalent, but hardly ever used in crime compared to handguns. This doesn't seem to matter to the VPC, they wich to ban them both.

First they came for the deviants ...

So I was reading some VPC ...

I was reading their "cease fire" strategy guide to reduce firearms violence.
I've got to admit that both sides of this debate have members in their ranks who hardly qualify as the brightest stars in the sky, but some of the things I read ...
Still, there was some quite inspirational material in there, especially concerning the amount of firearm homicides that were of "felonious nature".

"The first is that crime killings are in fact one of the smallest categories of firearms death. Of the 30,565 (10,895 homicides, 18,169 suicides, 1,501 unintentional injuries) firearms deaths reported in 1988, only seven percent (2,179) stemmed from actual or suspected felony activity.(...) Yet to categorize gun violence solely as a crime issue dismisses more than 90 percent of all gun deaths."

This is most interesting material, I'd say.
So, truly felonious crimes like those school shootings, drive-by's and assassinations only amount to 7% of all shootings?
That's why you're bent on banning standard capacity magazines from civilian ownership? And how exactly is that limit going to do anything about those suicides which account for nearly 60% off all victims? Oh you're going to ban cheap handguns are you? Wonder how Kurt Cobain feels about that ...

They started by blaming woman-oriented marketing by the gun industry on the increase of gun suicides by females, after they stopped poisoning themselves. The VPC casually omitted that this was all after barbiturates had been banned under Nixons war on drugs, so yeah, there's your reason for the increase.
But hey, if it'll help you keep all of those weapons out the hands of a whopping 7% of all triggermen, who cares about the truth right?