Here's a letter to the editor I wrote to my paper _twice_, and they didn't print it. So I sent it to another. Feel free to use it if you like, and change the AG reference and the PD.
To the editors:
Within minutes of the announcement that Dick Cheney would be George
Bush's running mate, gun ban zealots in congress and elsewhere denounced
Cheney's 1988 vote against a ban on so-called "plastic guns."
Even our own state attorney general has now joined the chorus, extolling
a ban that was the result of a fear campaign leading the public to
believe
that there were plastic guns that could go undetected by airport metal
detectors and x-ray machines. Conspicuously absent from the argument was
the fact that such non-metallic objects as hearts, lungs and other
organs are viewed on x-rays every day by doctors and nurses.
The gun at the center of the 1988 controversy was the Austrian-produced
Glock. The Glock contains some lightweight polymer external parts, but
83% of its construction is hardened steel, and it is readily
identifiable as a firearm when passed through metal detectors and x-ray
scanners. Today, that same Glock is one of the most widely issued
sidearms for law enforcement agencies nationwide, including the
Milwaukee Police Department, and is popular with citizens for
self-defense purposes.
Emotions and distortion are tools of the trade for gun banners, and it
is telling that Mr. Cheney chose instead to use reasoning when he
refused to ban something that did not exist in 1988, does not exist
today, and in all probability will never exist in the foreseeable
future. Our concern
should be with the mindset of congressmen who acquiesced to the hysteria
of the gun banners and squandered taxpayer dollars debating a bill that
would ban a non-existent object.
*******
Dick
Want to send a message to Bush? Sign the petition at
http://www.petitiononline.com/monk/petition.html and forward the link to every gun owner you know.