This is something that anyone apathetic about the so-called "Assault Weapons Ban" should be required to read.

The features that flagged these guns as intolerable, such as bayonet mounts and folding stocks, are features that have nothing to do with their killing power. The ban is the moral equivalent of banning red cars because they look too fast.

Some gun-control supporters acknowledge as much. Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center said earlier this year, "If the existing assault weapons ban expires, I personally do not believe it will make one whit of difference in terms of our objective, which is reducing death and injury and getting a particularly lethal class of firearms off the streets." The VPC now says a broader ban is needed.

Why? Because "gun makers have easily evaded the law by making slight, cosmetic changes to banned guns and continued their sale unimpeded." But if you ban red cars and automakers increase their output of maroon ones, that's not evading the law - that's complying with the law.

Firearms manufacturers have eliminated the features that made their weapons unacceptable, and now the critics complain that the weapons are still unacceptable. So why did they worry about those features to begin with? And why expand the ban to get rid of these semiautomatics while allowing others that perform identically?

The VPC claims that one out of five police officers killed in the line of duty in recent years was shot with an assault weapon. But this includes "assault weapons" that were not banned by the 1994 law, which suggests a conveniently elastic definition. The organization concludes that the persistence of these guns in police shootings proves the need for a more extensive law. In reality, it suggests that no ban will matter much.

The problem is that proponents of gun bans don't argue with logic. They intentionally feed on people's ignorance about firearms. The only way they've been able to advance their agenda is by intentionally deceiving voters about the difference between the guns that actually are banned, and the guns that people think are being banned. A good example of this is CNN's intentional deception of showing automatic firearms every time they talk about extending the Clinton Gun Ban (which doesn't regulate automatics).