According to the AP news, The Bi national Task Force on the United States-Mexico Border has recommended that the U.S. should immediately instate an assault weapons ban in order to improve the security of both the U.S. and Mexico.
One co-chairman of the Task Force, Robert Bonner, was quoted in the AP saying, “Improving our efforts ... will weaken the drug cartels and disrupt their illegal activities, and make it easier ultimately to dismantle and destroy them.”
In 1994 President Clinton instated an assault weapons ban. According to a Newsweek article, that ban lapsed five years ago and since then the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has “lifted virtually all restrictions on imports of foreign-made assault weapons, permitting a flood of cheap Romanian, Bulgarian and other Eastern European AK-47s to enter the country, according to gun-control groups.”
At the end of the 1994 assault weapons ban, the NRA put out a press release titled “Finally, the end of a sad era – Clinton Gun Ban stricken from the books!” The release argued that the gun ban was a “misguided law, which had no effect on the actions of criminals, but penalized law-abiding citizens, [and] was built on a campaign of lies. It was ended through a campaign of education, facts, and grassroots activism. The sunset of this ban was only made possible through the tireless efforts of millions of NRA members and tens of millions of American gun owners over the past 10 years.”
In February of 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder told the press that the Obama administration planned to reinstate the assault weapons ban. However, the Obama administration has since put the assault weapons ban on the back burner, claiming that Congress is too tied up with economic recovery and health care to deal with the ban at this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment