Political Quotes

“without a doubt, the provisions of the District of Columbia's gun laws that have the most adverse effect upon the largest number of law-abiding District residents, are the ban on using firearms to defend yourself at home, the handgun ban, and other measures that prevent or discourage the purchase of rifles and shotguns. Much has already been said about those provisions of the District's gun laws, so I would like to address a provision that hasn't received the same amount of attention. I refer to the section of the District's laws that define various types of firearms, particularly the definition of ``machine gun.'' As is fairly common knowledge, machine guns were invented in the late 1800s, and they are fundamentally the same today as they were then. They fire repeatedly as long as you hold the trigger down. They are the only firearms that operate in that way. And they all operate in that way. Federal law defines a machine gun appropriately, as a gun that shoots--and I quote--``automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.'' I know of no one who disagrees with that definition. The problem is, the District also defines some semi-automatic firearms as machine guns.”