"No Compromise."
This was included in our most recent member alert, and was a press release earlier this week.
The Nebraska Firearms Owners Association (NFOA) is engaged in discussions with Vice President Biden’s Task Force on Gun Control. On Friday afternoon, the NFOA participated in a conference call with the White House to discuss the President’s plans to attempt to reduce gun violence.
The White House reiterated their goals of preventing repeats of the recent tragedies, addressing mental health, and enhancing school safety. However, the stated goals and the discussed potential plans didn’t match. “I found it disappointing that the White House seemed to focus on potential new laws that would restrict law-abiding citizens from legally purchasing firearms and firearm accessories for self-defense or other lawful purposes, while they spent very little time considering how to better enforce our existing 20,000+ gun laws,” stated NFOA President Wesley Dickinson. “The criminals who perpetrated the recent tragedies broke dozens of existing gun laws and simply passing more new laws won’t stop evil criminals from doing evil things – because criminals, by definition, break laws.”
The new laws and policies being considered by the White House, including prohibiting certain types of firearms and restricting magazine capacities, were a failed experiment when it was tried from 1994 to 2004. In four different studies on the effectiveness of the 1994 "Assault Weapons" Ban, the U.S. Department of Justice, the National Institute of Justice, the Center for Disease Control, the National Research Council, and the University of Pennsylvania all found that the 1994 ban on semi-automatic rifles and standard capacity magazines had "no measurable effect on crime rates" of any type. Furthermore, a study by the University of California, Berkley found that the reduced magazine capacities during the 1994 ban had no effect on the number of rounds fired in mass shootings.
If the White House were really focused on protecting our children, they’d stop obsessing on repeating failed policies of the past and start focusing on enforcing the existing gun laws in this country while evaluating school security policies and protocols. Until the White House straightens their priorities, the Vice President’s Task Force on Gun Control is no more than yet another attempt by the Federal Government to make firearm ownership more difficult for the law abiding citizens, while continuing to be soft on criminals when it comes to enforcing existing laws on the books. The President needs to understand that when it comes to the firearms owners in Nebraska, there will be no compromise.
