50-caliber rifle bannedThe .50-caliber rifle, which is said to be a "potential terrorist tool," weighs 30-plus pounds and the government says it should be banned. It costs several thousand dollars, which would drown the bank account of an average American. But it has never been used in a criminal way or in a terrorist manner.
Here in California, the state legislature has passed a law almost making it impossible to obtain a .50-caliber rifle and Governor Schwarzenegger recently signed a bill into law. The law states that anyone who obtained a .50-caliber rifle on or before Jan. 1, 2005 must register it with the Department of Justice. Doesn't this just sound ironic? We saw Schwarzenegger in movies and he always had something to do with guns. They weren't your average .22-caliber rifle or .38-special hand guns. But yet he bans the .50-caliber rifle.
We should let the people decide weather they want to buy one or not; we should not decide for them which gun they can or cannot buy. With a gun weighing 30-plus pounds, no one is going to want to climb three floors to go out and do some damage. By then they have thought about it and decided not to do it.
Perhaps the government should be more concerned with the guns that have been found in terrorist hideouts and the guns that have been used in criminal actions, rather than a gun that is used by a small number of law- abiding gun owners. The government should pay more attention to what is going on around the world than to set propaganda against something that has done nothing to them, and hurts the law-abiding gun owners.
Jose Barba
Kelseyville
http://www.record-bee.com/Stories/0,1413,255~33813~2756990,00.html
