LTE: Assault weapons ban is a waste of time

February 26, 2005
Columbus Dispatch

Columbus City Councilman Michael C. Mentel’s effort to enact a ban on socalled assault weapons has less to do with the safety of residents and police officers and more to do with justifying his existence on City Council as chairman of the Safety and Judiciary Committee.

If he truly cared about the safety of citizens and officers in Columbus, he would ban motor vehicles in the city, which have always been a bigger killer than guns of any type ever have.

If the hype and hysteria generated by Mentel were to be believed, it wouldn’t be safe to leave your house because armed throngs of machine-gun-toting rebels would be gunning down people on a daily basis. By having the police stage a demonstration with the media in tow, he is misusing the media to advance his agenda, while playing on the fears of the general public.

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His anti-gun agenda also neatly ignores the facts:

• Nationwide, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 1993 that violent criminals carry or use a "military-type gun" in only about 1 percent of the crimes nationwide.

• Iver Peterson in The New York Times reported, "Although New Jersey’s pioneering ban on military-style assault rifles was sold to the state as a crime-fighting measure, its impact on violence in the state . . . has been negligible, both sides agree."

• FBI reports show that before the nationwide 1994 ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, no more than three officers were killed in any one year by such guns.

• Even anti-gun lobbyist groups don’t see so-called assault weapons as a threat. In November 1995, a study published by anti-gun lobbyists Handgun Control Inc. stated that the overwhelming majority of guns used to murder police officers are not "assault weapons."

• The killing of Columbus Police Officer Bryan Hurst during a bank robbery, the "highway sniper" shootings and the recent shootings of parked cars in the Bethel Road area all involved handguns.

• Columbus Police Lt. Stephen Schwab stated at a recent City Council hearing that the 9 mm handgun is the most common firearm used by criminals in Columbus.

Mentel needs to call off this witch hunt immediately and start focusing his efforts toward pinpointing and reducing actual threats to public safety. By continuing to advance his anti-gun agenda, he is wasting taxpayers’ time and money and sacrificing our liberties in a make-believe effort to crack down on imaginary outlaws.

Michael A. LaMorte
Columbus