From ca-firearms-request@shell.portal.com Tue Aug 3 15:40:11 1993 Received: by jobe (4.1/1.34) id AA15030; Tue, 3 Aug 93 15:35:29 PDT Errors-To: ca-firearms-request@shell.portal.com Sender: ca-firearms-request@shell.portal.com Precedence: bulk Received: from nova.unix.portal.com (nova.ARPA) by jobe (4.1/1.34) id AA15025; Tue, 3 Aug 93 15:35:26 PDT Received: by nova.unix.portal.com (5.65b/4.1 1.388) id AA29215; Tue, 3 Aug 93 15:35:07 -0700 Received: from dazixca.dazixca.ingr.com (inzinga.b11.ingr.com) by ingr.ingr.com (5.65c/1.920611) id AA01198; Tue, 3 Aug 1993 17:34:52 -0500 Received: from hound.dazixca.ingr.com by dazixca.dazixca.ingr.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA29396; Tue, 3 Aug 93 15:30:21 PDT Received: by hound.dazixca.ingr.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA01334; Tue, 3 Aug 93 15:30:52 PDT From: crphilli@hound.dazixca.ingr.com (Ron Phillips) Message-Id: <9308032230.AA01334@hound.dazixca.ingr.com> Subject: Senator Feinstein & aw.ban To: ca-firearms@shell.portal.com (California Firearms), firearms-politics@GODIVA.NECTAR.CS.CMU.EDU (Firearms Politics) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 93 15:30:51 PDT X-Mailer: ELM [version 06.00.01.12 (2.3 PL11)] Status: RO August 3, 1993 Senator Dianne Feinstein United States Senate Washington, DC 20510-0504 Dear Senator Feinstein: Withdraw your support of any further gun control measures, especially Senator Metzenbaum's "assault weapons ban". To continue supporting such measures will perpetuate the deceit and fraud that is being heaped upon the American public by our elected representatives, Handgun Control, Incorporated, and the news media. Remember that, according to an article in the June 27 Washington Times, California's Justice Department officials suppressed a nine-month-old law enforcement report showing that "assault weapons" are rarely used in crimes. Fueling concerns over the on-going cover-up surrounding the state's semi-auto ban the September 26, 1991, "assault weapon" report was disclosed by state officials after a citizens' group, the California Organization for Public Safety (COPS), made public a copy it obtained through anonymous sources. But the report tells an entirely different story. "Further confirmation that `assault weapons' are unusual in firearms assaults comes from the scarcity of representative specimens of `assault weapons' in crime laboratory reference firearms collections," the study determined. As the Washington Times reported, "based on data collected from 21 city and county crime laboratories throughout the state...assault weapons play a very small role in assault and homicide firearm cases...of the 4,844 (total) guns that crime labs kept track of, only 45 fell under the designation `assault weapons'" as defined by the state's 1989 gun-ban law. That's less than 1%. Not all the guns studied were directly involved in violent crime, however, many having been tracked by police for other reasons. "Only 963 of the guns that the crime labs reported were actually used in homicides and assaults, the survey found, and only 36 of those were assault weapons. The hushed report reaffirmed the results of a previous study of crime lab reports from 46 of California's 58 counties. Among other revelations, the study showed that only 2% of fatal shootings investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department's South Bureau homicide unit during 1990 and 1991 involved "assault weapons." In May, the assistant director of the Law Enforcement Division of California's Department of Justice, Steve C. Helsley, commented on the earlier report. Helsley acknowledged that "[assault weapons] don't play a large role in violent crime, and they never have." Helsley also reported that less than 3% of firearms seized in 1990 by state narcotics agents were "assault weapons." A 1987 study by the California Justice Department's Bureau of Forensic Services, showed that just five of the 217 firearms submitted from homicide and assault cases were "assault-type weapons." In an Oct. 31, 1988, memo to a superior, Helsley wrote that the study "confirmed out intuition that assault-type firearms were the least of our worries. It's really the .22-caliber and .38-caliber handguns and 12-gauge shotguns that inflict the majority of the carnage." Data from America's East Coast paint the same picture. Disproving the lie that "assault weapons are the weapons of choice of drug dealers," reports from the Washington, D.C., Police Department and FBI show that of over 950 homicides in the city during the past two years, not one involved a rifle of any sort, let alone a rifle mislabeled with the "assault weapon" buzzword. Rifles of undetermined type were involved in about 0.1% of all robberies and assaults in the nation's capital. 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, two years after it took effect, has been negligible, both sides agree, and debate over its impact is colored more by opinion than by fact. Until the ban was imposed, the police were not required to keep statistics on the number of crimes involving assault rifles. In the years since, the statistics show them to be a tiny fraction - .026 of 1 percent - of the total. Frank DeVesa, New Jersey's first assistant attorney general, said "We're ready to concede that there is not a really high percentage of crimes committed with assault firearms. Joseph Constance, deputy chief of police on the Trenton police force said, "Assault rifles have never been an issue in law enforcement. I have been on this job for 25 years and I haven't seen a drug dealer carry one. They are not used in crimes, they are not used against police officers." Dominick Polifrone, head of the New Jersey bureau of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said in an interview, "I've never encountered an assault rifle. The guns we have been dealing with are mostly 9-millimeter handguns and .38-caliber pistols, because they're easier to conceal." Regards, Cameron Phillips, Jr. xxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx San Jose, CA 95123 -- ************************************************************** * Ron Phillips crphilli@hound.dazixca.ingr.com * * Senior Customer Engineer * * Intergraph Electronics * * 381 East Evelyn Avenue VOICE: (415) 691-6473 * * Mountain View, CA 94041 FAX: (415) 691-0350 * **************************************************************