There ain't been no new "assault rifles" in 27 years!

Good ol' Bob Owens is one of the honchos at the Revolutionary War Veterans' Association's home range of the Appleseed Project, down yonder in the sticks at Ramseur, NC.  (It's a mighty fine range, in Ol' Backwoods' opinion.)  Ol' Bob is also a mighty fine blogger, and he sends a fine one over the transom today.

Ol' Bob's point is that the yellow-dog, horribly-misnamed "Firearm Owner's Protection Act" of 1986 actually PROHIBITS the manufacture of automatic weapons (machine guns) for transfer to non-law-enforcement after May 19, 1986.

Now, I gotta bone to pick with President Reagan up in Heaven when I get there for signin' that thing with that poison pill in it, but I reckon he figured it'd get knocked out in the next bill.  It did not.

{Edit:  I found out from John Ross, author of "Unintended Consequences", that the poison-pil Hughes Amendment was not in the version Reagan signed, as it was added in the last 30 seconds before the vote.}

As Ol' Bob says on his blog, that means there ain't been no new machine guns since:

Val Kilmer was “Iceman” and Madonna was still newly-married to Sean Penn.

Heh, heh, heh.

What he media is trying to do is to conflate automatic weapons (like the M-16) with semi-automatic ones, like Ol' Backwoods' AR-15s.   Ol' Josh Sugarman, that city slicker from one of them gun-bannin' groups, got that particular LIE started in the late 80's:

"The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons – anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun – can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons." - Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center (VPC) - 1989

Make no mistake: it is a LIE.  And the media tries to tell it bigger and bolder all the time.

We gotta push back, people.