Lexington, Mass., has long been famous as being the place where American revolutionaries fired “The Shot Heard ‘Round The World.” Now, a Harvard professor wants the city to ban America’s most popular rifles, which he calls “assault weapons.”
In an interview Sunday on NPR, Robert Rotberg referred to the hastily concocted Highland Park, Ill., ban on semi-automatics, saying it “made perfect sense to use their very carefully crafted legislation, which not only bans assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, but it also specifies the hundred or so specific weapons that are prohibited.”
Rotberg, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who lost a bid to become a selectman of Lexington in 2014, might do well to study history; Clinton’s failed 1994 “assault weapons” ban expired because, according to government data, it had no impact on crime. FBI data records that rifles of all types are used in less than 2 percent of U.S. crimes.
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