For legal and judicial studies just as doctors can only recommend an effective treatment plan if they first form a correct diagnosis based on accurate assessment of the symptoms policy analysts and policy makers must have an accurate understanding of the societal problems they are seeking to combat unfortunately too many policy makers
Appear completely uninformed about basic factual realities related to guns and gun violence don’t misunderstand me we all want safer communities but the characteristics distinguishing so-called assault weapons from non assault weapons are not factors like caliber lethality or rate of fire proposals to ban scary-looking features like barrel
Shrouds or pistol grips are for all intents and purposes proposals to force law-abiding citizens to own guns that are harder for them to handle harder to fire accurately and more likely to cause them injuries even when they are being used for lawful purposes moreover semi-automatic rifles are not a
Meaningful driving factor behind rates of gun violence two-thirds of gun deaths in this country are suicides where the type of firearm is essentially irrelevant with respect to gun crimes over 90% are committed with handguns rifles of any kind are definitively used in only 3 to 4 percent of gun homicides
Every year and an American citizen is four times as likely to be stabbed to death then they are to be shot to death with a rifle of any kind despite frequent claims that semi-automatic rifles are the weapon of choice for mass public shooters in the last decade over
Half of these shootings have been carried out with handguns alone on the other hand semi-automatic rifles like the ar-15 are so well suited for defensive action against threats in a civilian context that the Department of Homeland Security quite literally designates them as personal defense wet Bin’s for law enforcement officers it
Has little wonder then that millions of law-abiding citizens in this country also choose these types of semi-automatic rifles as their own personal defense weapons far from needing to be protected from these rifles law-abiding Americans benefit when they are allowed to defend themselves with them particularly in situations where they’re outnumbered
Just last week a homeowner in Rockdale County Georgia relied on his scary looking semi-automatic assault weapon to defend himself against three masked teens armed with at least one handgun who tried to rob him and other residents in their own front yard ironically the rifle deemed an assault weapon by many
In this room was used defensively to protect innocent people against assault while the perpetrators used a non assault weapon offensively to commit actual assault importantly some of the most famous examples of the defensive use of assault weapons by civilians come from scenarios where the government has been either unable or unwilling to
Defend entire communities from large-scale civil unrest during the 1992 LA riots for example law enforcement was nowhere to be found as hundreds of looters ransacked Koreatown ordinary store owners like Richard Rhee and his employees took it upon themselves to defend their livelihoods from lawlessness using in many cases semi-automatic rifles similar stories
Emerged during the civil unrest in Ferguson Missouri in 2014 there are some here today who still genuinely don’t understand why or how anyone would need such scary looking rifles for purposes other than mass murder and so I have permission from my mother to explain it to you by partially embarrassing her my
Mother did not grow up with firearms and they will never be her favorite thing in the world in fact she’d never handled a firearm until I took her to the range for the first time several years ago now I love my mother but like every other novice with a handgun
She was quite bad I mean she struggled to hit a stationary target from 6 yards out under ideal conditions and then she picked up an ar-15 and I watched my mother put a fist sized grouping of lead in the center mass of a target from 20 yards out that is why law abiding
Citizens by millions of these firearms when accuracy and stopping power matter they are simply better Americans use firearms to defend themselves between 500,000 and 2 million times every year but God forbid that my mother has ever faced with a scenario where she has to stop a
Threat to her life but if she is I hope politicians protected by professional armed security didn’t strip her of the right to use the firearm she can handle most competently frankly I hope she has in her hands the scariest looking assault weapon she can find so that we
Can both be confident in her ability to end the threat thank you
