This was an open letter and posted on 29 January 2013. Shortly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting a group of current and former U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers started talking about making a statement one the website Professional Soldiers. After a month of back and forth, edits, re-edits and re-re-edits it was finally ready.
It was sent out privately to every Special Forces soldier available with the request that if they agreed with it, would they be willing to sign their name. The list was not made public but it was 100% verified that every single person who put their name down had graduated the Special Forces Qualifications course and was authorized to wear the Green Beret and Special Forces tab.
After what happened in Orlando I thought it was important to put it back out for everyone to read.
I am honored that I was able to put my name on that list.
Loren Schofield
De Oppresso Liber
Protecting the Second Amendment: Why all Americans Should Be Concerned
We are current or former
Army Reserve, National Guard, and active duty US Army Special Forces soldiers
(Green Berets). We have all taken an oath to “...support and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic; that
I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.…” The Constitution of the
United States is without a doubt the single greatest document in the history of
mankind, codifying the fundamental principle of governmental power and
authority being derived from and granted through the consent of the governed.
Our Constitution established a system of governance that preserves, protects,
and holds sacrosanct the individual rights and primacy of the governed as well
as providing for the explicit protection of the governed from governmental
tyranny and/or oppression. We have witnessed the insidious and iniquitous
effects of tyranny and oppression on people all over the world. We and our
forebears have embodied and personified our organizational motto, De Oppresso Liber
[To Free the Oppressed], for more than a half century as we have fought, shed
blood, and died in the pursuit of freedom for the oppressed.
Like you, we are also
loving and caring fathers and grandfathers. Like you, we have been stunned,
horrified, and angered by the tragedies of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora,
Fort Hood, and Sandy Hook; and like you, we are searching for solutions to the
problem of gun-related crimes in our society. Many of us are educators in our
second careers and have a special interest to find a solution to this problem.
However, unlike much of the current vox populi reactions to this tragedy, we
offer a different perspective.
First, we need to set the
record straight on a few things. The current debate is over so-called “assault weapons”
and high capacity magazines. The terms "assault weapon" and
"assault rifle" are often confused. According to Bruce H. Kobayashi
and Joseph E. Olson, writing in the Stanford Law and Policy Review, “Prior to
1989, the term ‘assault weapon’ did not exist in the lexicon of firearms. It is
a political term [underline added for emphasis], developed by anti-gun
publicists to expand the category of assault rifles.”
The M4A1 carbine is a
U.S. military service rifle - it is an assault rifle. The AR-15 is not an
assault rifle. The “AR” in its name does not stand for “Assault Rifle” - it is
the designation from the first two letters of the manufacturer’s name –
ArmaLite Corporation. The AR-15 is designed so that it cosmetically looks like
the M4A1 carbine assault rifle, but it is impossible to configure the AR-15 to
be a fully automatic assault rifle. It is a single shot semi-automatic rifle
that can fire between 45 and 60 rounds per minute depending on the skill of the
operator. The M4A1 can fire up to 950 rounds per minute. In 1986, the federal
government banned the import or manufacture of new fully automatic firearms for
sale to civilians. Therefore, the sale of assault rifles are already banned or
heavily restricted!
The second part of the
current debate is over “high capacity magazines” capable of holding more than
10 rounds in the magazine. As experts in military weapons of all types, it is
our considered opinion that reducing magazine capacity from 30 rounds to 10
rounds will only require an additional 6 -8 seconds to change two empty 10
round magazines with full magazines. Would an increase of 6 –8 seconds make any
real difference to the outcome in a mass shooting incident? In our opinion it
would not. Outlawing such “high capacity magazines” would, however, outlaw a
class of firearms that are “in common use”. As such this would be in
contravention to the opinion expressed by the U.S. Supreme Court recent
decisions.
Moreover, when the
Federal Assault Weapons Ban became law in 1994, manufacturers began retooling
to produce firearms and magazines that were compliant. One of those
ban-compliant firearms was the Hi-Point 995, which was sold with ten-round
magazines. In 1999, five years into the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, the
Columbine High School massacre occurred. One of the perpetrators, Eric Harris,
was armed with a Hi-Point 995. Undeterred by the ten-round capacity of his
magazines, Harris simply brought more of them: thirteen magazines would be
found in the massacre's aftermath. Harris fired 96 rounds before killing
himself.
Now that we have those
facts straight, in our opinion, it is too easy to conclude that the problem is
guns and that the solution to the problem is more and stricter gun control
laws. For politicians, it is politically expedient to take that position and pass
more gun control laws and then claim to constituents that they have done the
right thing in the interest of protecting our children. Who can argue with
that? Of course we all want to find a solution. But, is the problem really
guns? Would increasing gun regulation solve the problem? Did we outlaw cars to
combat drunk driving?
What can we learn from
experiences with this issue elsewhere? We cite the experience in Great Britain.
Despite the absence of a “gun culture”, Great Britain, with one-fifth the population
of the U.S., has experienced mass shootings that are eerily similar to those we
have experienced in recent years. In 1987 a lone gunman killed 18 people in
Hungerford. What followed was the Firearms Act of 1988 making registration
mandatory and banning semi-automatic guns and pump-action shotguns. Despite
this ban, on March 13, 1996 a disturbed 43-year old former scout leader, Thomas
Hamilton, murdered 16 school children aged five and six and a teacher at a
primary school in Dunblane, Scotland. Within a year and a half the Firearms Act
was amended to ban all private ownership of hand guns. After both shootings
there were amnesty periods resulting in the surrender of thousands of firearms
and ammunition. Despite having the toughest gun control laws in the world, gun
related crimes increased in 2003 by 35% over the previous year with firearms
used in 9,974 recorded crimes in the preceding 12 months. Gun related homicides
were up 32% over the same period. Overall, gun related crime had increased 65%
since the Dunblane massacre and implementation of the toughest gun control laws
in the developed world. In contrast, in 2009 (5 years after the Federal Assault
Weapons Ban expired) total firearm related homicides in the U.S. declined by 9%
from the 2005 high (Source: “FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Master File, Table
310, Murder Victims – Circumstances and Weapons Used or Cause of Death:
2000-2009”).
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