Shoot 'em up! Bang! Bang!

If the dead could speak, William and Faith Kinkel would describe how their 15-year old son Kipland shot them dead in 1998 at their Springfield, OR, home; he in the back of the head and she in the face while climbing a stairway. The following day, Kip was armed with two pistols and a hunting knife but it was a Ruger .22 semi-automatic rifle loaded with 50 rounds of ammunition that killed two students and wounded 25 at Thurston High School.

In the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre, 18-year old Eric Harris fired 96 times from a Hi-Point 995 Carbine 9mm semi-automatic rifle with thirteen 10-round magazines. Fellow terrorist Dylan Klebold, 17, fired 55 shots from a 9mm Intratec Tec-9 semi-automatic handgun that in total carried one 52-, one 32-, and one 28-round magazine. They killed 12 students and a teacher.

The 2007 Virginia Tech shootings by Seung-Hui Cho killed 27 students and 5 instructors with the use of two semi-automatic handguns and an arsenal of 400 rounds of ammunition.

An AK-47 assault rifle converted to automatic caused the March 2006 death of 14-year old Starkesia Reed in Chicago; the following week, another stray bullet from a Tec-9 assault handgun killed 10-year old Siretha White.

An April 4th response to a call of domestic disturbance led to the death of three Pittsburgh police officers by an AK-47 assault rifle used by Richard Poplawskia.

On April 9, three stray bullets from more than 50 rounds fired from two AR-15 semi-automatic rifles killed 8-year old Paris Whitehead-Hamilton. St. Petersburg police Chief Chuck Harmon said, ”Assault weapons are good for one purpose only, and that’s to kill other human beings. They don’t belong on any city street in America.”

"It's almost like we have water pistols going up against these high-powered rifles," said John Rivera, president of the Dade County Police Benevolent Association. "Our weaponry and our bulletproof vests don't match up to any of those types of weapons.”

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida R. Alexander Acosta stated, “These bullets are very powerful: they go through walls, they go through cars, and if you just spray the general vicinity you’re going to get innocent bystanders. A shooting that might have been an injury previously is now a death.”

Gun rights expert David Kopel suggested Obama would seek new gun laws and become the most anti-gun President in U.S. history. As reported in The Outdoor Wire, a sports on-line publication, manufacturers are months behind on orders for semi-automatic pistols, AR and AK rifles, and anything with high-capacity magazines and that “buyers we've surveyed across the country seem to have a single explanation for their rush to purchase firearms – Obama.”

The hint of a revival of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, that expired in 2004, caused the average price of AK-47s to double from $350 last September to more than $700.

Kristen Rand, legislative director of the “Violence Policy Center” stated, “The 1994 law in theory banned AK-47s, MAC-10s, UZIs, AR-15s and other assault weapons. Yet the gun industry easily found ways around the law and most of these weapons are now sold in post-ban models virtually identical to the guns Congress sought to ban in 1994.”

Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently gave a gun lobbyist’s simplistic view that the answer to gun ownership is “enforcing the laws we have now.”

Private, unlicensed gun sales are currently exempt from federal background checks and sales retention requirements, such as purchases at gun shows, some of which are (conveniently?) attributed to robberies of homes, cars or dealer stores.

Surprisingly, only seven states and the District of Columbia require gun owners to report their guns lost or stolen – another reason for the need of national standards.

By some counts, of an estimated 300M guns in the U.S., there are close to 4 million assault weapons. The number of undocumented gun owners and their unregistered guns in this country may surpass the numbers of undocumented immigrant workers. All of the above infringe upon the rights of law-abiding Americans.

Legislation that would require the licensing and tracking data of all gun sales would make living in America much safer. The wording doesn’t have to infringe upon “the right of the people to bear Arms.”

Gun rights enthusiasts cite the Second Amendent as the right to acquire whatever firearms suit their deadly passions. But what about the precursor to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the inalienable right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To gun-huggers, happiness is a warm gun; they place their liberties above defenseless Americans who are, at any given moment, put in harm’s way of unfriendly fire.

Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. People with guns kill people. People with semi-automatic guns kill a lot more people. Guns with multi-round magazine attachments are not defense weapons. They are assault weapons.