Tag: worst enemies

I don’t know how accurate this is, but it’s the closest I’ve seen to date to the whole Field & Stream piece by David E. Petzal from 1994. Taken from a comment at Petzal’s last most recent blog post – read it and weep:

Field & Stream (West ed.), June 1994 v99 n2 p26(2)
Reveille. (gun control laws) David E. Petzal.
THE BUGLE CALL KNOWN AS REVEILLE IS A CHEERFUL, energetic tune that, when I was in the Army, few soldiers actually got to hear. The real reveille was something quite different; it consisted of the NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge) snapping on the overhead lights at 4:30 A.M. and slamming a sawed-off broom handle around the inside of a garbage can. That is about the least cheerful experience that you can have, but it wakes you up for fair, and brings you face to face with reality.
Real-world reveille came for gun owners this February in the form of a single sentence buried deep in the 1994 Federal Budget. On page 201 of that document, under the heading “Passing Effective Crime Control Legislation,” there is this sentence: “The administration also supports a ban on semiautomatic firearms; limitations on access to handguns by juveniles; and the creation of a crime control fund to pay for eligible crime control initiatives.”
The key phrase, the one that turns on the overhead lights and crashes the broom handle around in the GI can, is “a ban on semi-automatic firearms.” Not “assault weapons,” but semi-automatic firearms. All of them. It is simple English, and there is nothing else it can mean. It means all semi-autos.
It also means that the NRA has been right all along when it warned us that an “assault weapon” bill was only one of a series of steps in a much more ambitious plan to outlaw many types of firearms. If you would like to dismiss the NRA’s warning as paranoid and hysterical, you must ignore the fact that the White House has put us on notice: All semi-autos are going to go if the Clinton Administration has its way.
In January, President Clinton included the following in his State of the Union Address to Congress:
“Hunters must always be free to hunt. Law-abiding adults should always be free to own guns and protect their homes. I respect that part of our culture. I grew up in it. . . . But I want to ask the sportsmen and others to join us in this campaign to stop gun violence. I say to you: I know you didn’t create this problem, but we need your help to solve it. There is no sporting purpose on earth that should stop the United States Congress from banning assault weapons that out-gun police and cut down children.”
Will the real Clinton policy please stand up? Before Congress and the United States, the President said he wants to get rid of assault weapons. In the Federal Budget, it’s semi-automatic firearms. Which is the real agenda?
There are a couple of possibilities. One is that some overreaching functionary was confused by the terms “semi-automatic firearm” and “assault weapon” and assumed they were interchangeable. This is given support by Barry Toiv, a spokesman for the Office of Management and the Budget, who was quoted as follows in the March 14th edition of The Washington Times: “The language in the budget is a mistake. It made its way through without being fixed.”

A more likely scenario is somewhat simpler. The Administration wants to ban semi-automatic firearms, judged the political climate to be favorable, and decided to put its intent on the public record, albeit not in a forthright manner.

Let us now consider the legislation submitted to Congress by Senator Diane Feinstein (D/CA). Amendment No. 1152 would, if ratified, be applied to the Omnibus Crime Bill (which was passed late in 1993 by the Senate), and appears to be the type of “reasonable” gun bill that “reasonable” gun owners should support. Amendment 1152 would ban, by name, a number of firearms (or duplicates of same) such as the Colt AR-15, MAC-10 and NRC-11, Galu, Uzi, Street Sweeper, and others of this ilk [e.g., the FN-FAL]. It would also ban guns by description; i.e., firearms that incorporate folding or telescoping stocks, flash suppressors, threaded muzzles, bayonet lugs, grenade launchers, and “conspicuous” pistol grips.
Also included are semi-auto shotguns with magazines that hold more than five rounds, and any large-capacity magazines (tubular magazines for .22 rimfires exempted), which means those that hold more than ten rounds.
The Feinstein Amendment would, upon passage, allow the present owners of proscribed guns to keep them, provided that they obtained and maintained Form 4473s documenting their ownership. However, no new guns of the types described could be bought, sold, or owned by civilians.
The Amendment contains a sunset clause, meaning that it expires after ten years. It also contains a lengthy list of firearms that are exempt. These guns include bolt, pump, and lever-actions, and many semi-automatic rifles and shotguns of the sporting variety.
If you are a gun owner who is looking for the middle ground, it is very hard to argue against legislation such as this. Senator Feinstein, it seems, has made every effort to prescribe “assault weapons” and protect “legitimate firearms.”
So what’s wrong with supporting–or at least not opposing–this amendment? Perhaps nothing–except that the reveille sounded by the 1994 Federal Budget warns us we can’t think of Amendment 1152 as a final step. Anti-gunners see it as an interim measure, paving the way for much wider prohibitions. Sarah Brady, Senator Metzenbaum, and others, have been quite honest about what they have in mind. The Feinstein Amendment is, in their view, just one in a series of steps to outlaw other types of firearms. The next step, without doubt, is handguns. In the lengthy list of “legitimate” guns protected by Amendment 1152, not one handgun is mentioned.
There’s more. President Clinton, in a lengthy interview in the December 9, 1993 issue of Rolling Stone was asked by national editor William Greider:
“Is it conceivable that the country. . . could entertain the possibility of banning handguns? Is that a cockamamie idea in your mind? Or is that in the future?”
President Clinton answered: “I don’t think the American people are there right now [emphasis mine]. But with more than 200 million guns in circulation, we’ve got so much more to do on this issue before we reach that. I don’t think that’s an option now [emphasis mine]. But there are certain kinds of guns that can be banned and a lot of other reasonable regulations that can be imposed. The American people’s attitudes are going to be shaped by whether things get better or worse.”
You are at liberty to interpret this any way you wish. My interpretation is: “We haven’t got the votes for a handgun ban right now. In the future, if I think the votes are there, well go for it.”
Judging by the letters we get at Field & Stream, and the people I talk to within the firearms industry, there are many of us who would like to rid the United States of assault weapons. It is true that these weapons account for only a miniscule percentage of armed crime, but the crimes they are used in tend to be horrific.
The classic example of this is the schoolyard massacre in Stockton, California, in 1989, when a deranged man named Patrick Purdy used an AK-47 clone to kill five children and wound twenty-nine others [in fact, most were shot with Purdy’s 15-shot, 9mm handgun]. The fact that Purdy was at liberty with a gun of any kind was due to a catastrophic failure of the California justice system, but the question we have to ask is, if Purdy had not had a thirty-shot semi-automatic rifle that was designed for the express purpose of taking human life, would the carnage have been so great?
Much is made about the difficulty involved in defining an “assault weapon.” However, firearms such as the AK-47, AKM, Uzi, Street Sweeper, and others [like the FN-FAL] have two things in common: They are designed for killing people, and they enable a person who is unskilled in the use of firearms to do an extraordinary amount of damage in practically no time at all.
Assault weapons are designed to be produced quickly and cheaply, and in huge numbers. They are designed to operate under conditions that would destroy civilian small arms. They are designed to put out a high volume of fire with a high degree of controllability. It is these characteristics that prevent assault weapons from being us as anything but what they are. (The AR-15/M-16, and the M1A in modified form, are highly accurate, and have a legitimate place in organized target competition.) You can remove the flash suppressors and the bayonet lugs; you can change the shape of the stocks; you can sell “sporting” ammunition for them; but they remain guns for killing people.
Gun owners–all gun owners–pay a heavy price for having to defend the availability of these weapons. The American public–and the gun-owning public; especially the gun-owning public–would be better off without the hardcore military arms, which puts the average sportsman in a real dilemma. We have received a wake-up call that clearly warns us that gun ownership is under siege. On the other hand, the public at large has been sent another kind of reveille: that guns are the root of most present-day evil, and the NRA is somehow to blame for the guns.
MOST AMERICANS HAVE LITTLE FAITH IN THE promises that politicians make, and with reason. Most gun owners are uneasy about making concessions of any kind, and with reason. But it may be time to consider shifting from an absolute opposition to any ban on any guns to an effort to get lawmakers to include a guarantee that will safeguard our handguns, and other arms–something not subject to the whims of the BATF or the Secretary of the Treasury or Sarah Brady. If the Feinstein Amendment included a list of “protected” handguns, and did away with its prohibition on magazines that hold more than ten shots, that would be something for us to think about. If Senator Fienstein is willing to meet gun owners halfway, we should think about her amendment very hard indeed.
For at some point we must face the fact that an Uzi or an AKM or an Ak-47 should no more be generally available than a Claymore mine or a block of C4 explosive. It is time for these guns to be limited to people with Treasury Department licenses, just as with fully automatic arms. I doubt if anyone would suffer much without assault weapons. Surely, we will suffer with them.

(All bold is my emphasis.) Petzal’s comment in that post:

As has been pointed out by those of you with long memories, I wrote a piece 13 years ago about the then-looming assault rifle ban. The story was unpopular with a lot of people, but nowhere in it did I endorse the ban, as some are claiming. I note that none of you have seen fit to haul up the many, many times I’ve said critical things about Senators Clinton, Schumer, Feinstein, and of course our beloved former President Bubba. But then it seems that most of you who are visiting here don’t read this blog, or Field & Stream, or what I’ve written to defend the Second Amendment over the years.

Here’s some other relevant information: When I wrote it, black guns were not nearly as important a part of shooting as they are now.

My response:

“When I wrote it, black guns were not nearly as important a part of shooting as they are now.”
Yet, had the gun-rights community backed down on the “evil black rifle” topic an inch, if they had, in fact, taken your advice and not paid the “heavy price for having to defend the availability of these weapons,” they would not be as popular as they are today. They would not be the dog, rather than the tail. And your M1A would most probably be banned as well, with your evil “long-range sniper rifles” next up on the agenda.
How can a “gun guy” not get this?
We cannot be divided on this topic. The right to arms is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot birds or clay pigeons. It is the right TO ARMS. Defend THAT, and you get to keep your particular sport. Deny it, and risk losing all.
The Black Rifle people understand that. The Fudds for some reason don’t.

No, Mr. Petzal, you didn’t “endorse the ban” – you advocated “compromise” after explaining that we couldn’t trust the gun ban crowd because they wanted everything. Frightened that you might lose your “sporting” semi-automatics, you were willing to give them half in the self-admittedly futile attempt to gain “a guarantee that will safeguard our handguns, and other arms“. After all, you can’t hunt with an “assault rifle,” right?

Thank you Petzal Chamberlain for your attempt to secure “peace in our time.”

But now, since we were not willing to “compromise” – and made that fact plain – the “Assault Weapons Ban” that your attitude helped pass has sunsetted and “black guns” are a far more important part of shooting world and the firearms industry than hunting rifles. And, subsequently, you’ve changed your words – but the tune remains the same.

Again I will quote master phrase-smith Tamara K:

Your attempt to throw me out of the sleigh, hoping that the wolves would be satisfied with my AR and would leave your precious bambi-zapper alone, is the most craven act of contemptible cowardice I’ve seen in a while.

Get over your stubbornness, and get your head out of your posterior.

Defend them ALL. Or LOSE them all, one little chunk at a time.

Even Neville supported Winston Churchill once reality was made obvious to him.