Date: Mon, 5 Jun 1995 03:10:32 +0000 (GMT)
From: [b g lover] at [netcom.com] (William Glover)
To: [g r flick] at [evansville.net]
Subject: Re: And now, Assault BB Guns

> Police recovered a loaded assault rifle-style BB gun."


I think it is time we dig into and understand exactly what is going
on here. The following is a clip from a 1991 paper which tells you
what is happening, and more importantly, WHY. Read it carefully...

The Gun Prohibition Lobby Has Carefully Exploited and Created Public
Confusion.

>From the paper of 1991...
     "Not everyone is confused. In the fall of 1988, Josh Sugarmann, formerly
of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, and presently head of his own
organization, the Violence Policy Center, authored a strategy memo for the
gun prohibition movement. One of the most technically knowledgeable persons
in the gun prohibition movement, Sugarmann had earlier earned distinction as
the father of the "plastic gun" controversy.

      In the 1988 memo, Sugarmann observed that the handgun-ban issue was
considered old news by the media, and there was little realistic possibility
of enacting handgun bans in the immediate future. In contrast, suggested 
Sugarmann, the "assault weapon" issue could allow the gun prohibition 
movement to open a massive attack on a new front.  Sugarmann noted that 
public misunderstanding over the nature of semiautomatics would play 
directly into the hands of the gun prohibition movement:

     The semiautomatic weapons menacing looks, coupled with the
     public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus
     semiautomatic assault weapons -- anything that looks like a machine
     gun is assumed to be a machine gun -- can only increase that chance
     of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

	< re-read the above several times, each time remembering that
	  it is a HCI policy planner doing the talking. >

     As several Senators noted, attaching the label "assault weapon" to
certain semiautomatic firearms was a brilliant stroke.   Many members of
Congress, like Rep. Gary Ackerman of New York, fell into this carefully laid
trap. In a House debate, Ackerman actually asked whether hunters needed "a
Mac 10 machine gun with 30 round banana clips of armor piercing bullets to
bag a quail?"   Of course armor piercing bullets are not available for
sale to the public (and have not been for over 20 years), and the current
"assault weapon" legislation has nothing to do with machineguns (which are
already heavily regulated)."

Now the kicker from the same paper...
"     Before proponents of "assault weapon" prohibition conclude that public
opinion supports their bill, they might ask themselves if this support is
more than just confusion over what an "assault weapon" is. If the public is
confused, much of the blame lies with journalists who conceive their duty as
producing agitprop for the gun prohibition lobby."

As you can tell, the reason this term keep showing up is calculated.
This is not funny, it is the most devious and incidious form of
propaganda designed to do only one thing, scare the public into
doing what it would not rationaly do if the facts were presented
correctly. That is why the lies on the nightly news, the confusion
of machine guns and the fuzzing of the difference between machine
guns and what was being banned.

And confusion it is...
There is trouble ahead for this plan though. A recent Field Poll,
that is one contrived and controlled by the CA leftist, found that
75% of the public said the militia were bad for the country, but,
and this was the big but, 82% were un-willing to give up ANY freedom
to achieve controlling them. So you could say the poll had a strange 
contradiction in the results.

Another number, 68% favored the assault weapon ban, but 75% said
that the Constitution gauaranteed all citizens the RIGHT to own guns, 
including semi-automatics. Another contradiction?

There are cracks in the HCI plan, education is paying off. The more
we do in educating people, the more the polls show contradicting
results IN THE SAME POLL. Since polsters seem to never divulge the
questions asked, consider how the questions must be skewed to
form and shape the result.

Another point. Some of the polls are actually trying to SHAPE
public opinion, not gauge it. Think about the questions you might
ask, and how you might phrase them, if your objective was to
FORM OPINION, not gauge opinion. When you look at the tools,
and you consider the goals, you can easily contrive questions
which "push" the results of the NEXT poll your way. Call these
same people back, say to "gauge how public opinion has changed"
and think about what poll result you might expect the second time.

Bill .... [b g lover] at [netcom.com]
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Being a citizen is a full-time job. If we wish to reclaim our rights,
we first must begin by reclaiming our responsibilities.
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