In 1994 President Bill Clinton signed into law the “Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994”. It was sponsored in the Senate by then Senator Joe Biden. The bill made it a crime to knowingly import, sell, manufacture, transfer or possess a semiautomatic “assault weapon.”

The Assault Weapons section of the bill expired in 2004 and was not renewed because no evidence was found that it reduced any type of violence.

A July 2022 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on equal access to justice for victims of gun violence act was chaired by Democrat Jerry Nadler. During the hearing Congressman Greg Stube, who served in the Army during Iraqi Freedom, presented a graphic description showing the differences between the M4 “weapon of war” he was issued and the AR-style commercially available semi-automatic rifles. The M4 rifle contains a selector switch which allowed the soldier to switch between fully automatic, 3-round burst or semi-automatic. The rifles the Democrats were attempting to ban do not have the ability to be fired in either fully automatic or in 3-round burst, only semi-automatic. The fully automatic and 3-round burst rifles are already banned.

Congressman Stube went on to say “There is no difference between the function of semi-automatic hand guns and an AR15 style weapon.” He finished by saying “Democrats majority discriminating against some of the most popular weapons in the US simply because they don’t like the way they look, not because of the way they function.” This past February, Democrat Congressman David Cicilline introduced H.R. 698, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2023. I guess Congressmen Cicilline and Pat Ryan don’t like the way the AR style rifles look. As Mr. Ferro stated in his letter in the May 11th issue of the Southern Ulster Times, “Guns don’t kill innocent people, deranged people do”.