Reply to -- A Letter to Mr. Gingrich

By Bruce A. Clark baclark@med.pitt.edu (Written 4/10/96)

This is factually in error. The so-called assault weapons ban removed nothing from the streets. It only prevented the future sale of certain named weapons and and a somewhat vague and confused selection of unnamed weapons, while permitting many other functionally-identical, but less "scary-looking," weapons to continue to be sold. Since the banned guns play such a minuscule role in crime to begin with, the net effect of this law is essentially nothing at all, except to inconvenience law-abiding people.