Hunting for Semi-Automatics

by Matt Kelley · 2009-02-27 05:57:00 UTC
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After Eric Holder announced drug raids and arrests across the country on Wednesday, he went on to reiterate the administration's aim to reinstate the ban on semi-automatic weapons that expired under Bush in 2004.

"As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons," Holder told reporters.

Semi-automatic weapons, which gun control advocates tend to call "assault weapons" and gun-rights supporters call "totally sweet, bad-ass guns that let me shoot a defenseless little deer 30 times in eight seconds," have long been at the center of the gun debate. (Ok, I'll admit I've never heard a gun-rights advocate use that terminology. But that doesn't mean they haven't used it. I just haven't heard it.)

National Shooting Sports Foundation President Steve Sanetti responded to Holder's comments yesterday, saying:

"These types of firearms, which are erroneously called 'assault weapons,' are used by millions of Americans for hunting, sporting and personal defense purposes,. We can only conclude that certain officials are waiting for any politically advantageous excuse to announce the intention to seek a new ban on sporting rifles, a ban that would break the president's campaign promise to gun owners that 'I'm not going to take away your guns.'"

But the Brady Campaign posted YouTube videos that question the purpose of hunting with semi-automatics. The difference between auto and semi-auto? It takes a semi-automatic weapon 3.5 seconds longer to empty a 30-bullet magazine. After Heller, nobody is challenging the right to own guns. But do we really need weapons of war in our homes?

The videos are after the jump:

Automatic:

Semi-Automatic:

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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