Jeff Soyer, my blogfather at Alphecca, has made the phony "Assault Weapons Ban" the theme of this week's Weekly Gun Bias Report. I am delighted to see that Jeff will be a guest on Cam Edwards radio show (NRANews tomorrow between 2 and 5 p.m.), and I can't wait!

One of the more astounding abuses of logic is the term "Assault Weapons." Its legal companion, the "Assault Weapons Ban" codifies this abuse of logic into an impractical law which creates power for bureaucrats (at the expense of the Second Amendment) and, of course, a platform for activists:

Assault weapons "have no place in a civilized society," said Dorothy Johnson-Speight, founder of Mothers in Charge, a group of women who have lost a son or daughter to violence.

Criminals "are going to have weapons more powerful than the police," she said.

State Rep. John Myers said: "We should spread the word and have everyone call their congressman" to denounce the expiration of the ban.

"This is the first full week of school," Qayyum said. "We want to keep homicides down. We want to hit the streets."

The ban on "assault weapons" had nothing to do with any weapon's firepower, as neither caliber nor velocity were in any way regulated. Furthermore, the police have always been exempt from such laws and have been allowed fully automatic weapons whenever they desire. Nor were "assault" weapons banned for the rate of fire (all semi-automatics fire one round for each stroke of the trigger). Rather, they were targeted for such characteristics as cosmetic appearance, magazine capacity, bayonet lugs! Banning large-capacity magazines meant very little in practice, because the old magazines are easily available (and also always available to police). And if anyone thinks banning bayonet lugs or flash suppressors makes anyone safer (or that criminals who have them are "more powerful" than the police), then I suggest a refresher course on the meaning of power. The police have, and will always have more powerful weapons.

But that's not the way Philadelphia Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson tries to spin it. He claims falsely that the expiration of the AWB places automatic weapons in the hands of the public -- and that such weapons are being used against police:

Although the investigation continues, Johnson said the officer had been shot with an automatic weapon. He said the expiration Monday of the Brady gun law would put more automatic weapons into the hands of criminals.

"They fired three automatic weapons at the officers," Johnson said of the supects. "They are like target practice walking right into a trap."

He can't have it both ways. But the weasel wording suggests to me that he's trying.

Sadly, much more demagogic language was deployed by Commissioner Johnson and other prominent anti-gun activists at a rally yesterday -- words like "genocide" and "terrorism."

"This is self-genocide," Myers said. "We are killing each other. The government is sitting back and watching us kill ourselves."

Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson said: "The only reason to have an assault weapon is to kill people."

Johnson noted that in the shooting of a police officer Friday night during a robbery at a McDonald's restaurant at Broad and Carpenter Streets in South Philadelphia, a gunman used an AK-47 assault rifle. The officer, Carlos Ramos, was shot in the shoulder. One of the alleged robbers was slain.

"I was in Washington last week, and everyone was talking about terrorism," Johnson said, adding that gun violence in Philadelphia was a form of terrorism.

Has it ever occurred to these activists that anyone crazed enough to gun down police officers might not stop to worry about whether his gun was on a bureaucratic list so complicated that lawyers have trouble interpreting it?

The deliberate blurring of the distinction between automatic and semiautomatic is being done for political reasons, because most people's eyes tend to glass over when they're given technical explanations. What they want is to hear about machine guns!

Or better yet, they want to see pictures. Today's Inquirer did not disappoint; just above the headline, there's a picture of a man standing in front of anti-gun activists holding a book showing large pictures of fully automatic Heckler and Koch submachine guns. The caption reads as follows:

Kenny Ali, president of Men and Women for Human Excellence, peruses a submachine-gun catalog after the rally. Seated are activists Malik Aziz (center), of Philadelphia, and Umar Salahuddin, of Atlantic City.

Aziz asks a good question:

"Once a person has done his time, why should you further punish him?"

Are not Second Amendment rights, grounded as they are in the human natural right of self defense, just as important as voting rights? I applaud both Ali and Aziz for turning their lives around and for trying to help their communities, but I don't understand this inconsistency. Nor do I understand how their communities are helped by undermining the right to self defense.

As I have said many times, gun control laws, like sodomy laws, criminalize personal freedom, invade privacy, and would put people in prison because of their lifestyle choices. A man's home is not his castle if he can't defend it.

(Something that politicians like Joseph Hoeffel don't seem to understand.....)