regard@ttidcc.UUCP (Adrienne Regard) (07/23/85)
>> If we look closely at this Act, we find that it was pushed through the >>legislature under pressure from the Hero of Chappaquiddick. >> -Don >This is a stupid, cheap shot. > -Charles Maybe a cheap shot, but not stupid. Our "Hero of Chappaquiddick", Ed himself, was one of the foremost supporters of a 1976 $200 million dollar legislative effort to confiscate all legally owned handguns in the state of Massachusetts. This was a straight-forward attempt on the part of legislators to achieve something through the system that they considered beneficial, so one can hardly fault them. The problem that comes up is that, in order to confiscate the weapons, they proposed to use the existing reigistration and licensing lists, which were originally put into place in Massachusetts under the explicit claim by the politicians that such lists would NEVER BE USED FOR CONFISCATION PURPOSES. (Where have we heard all this before? Germany? Czechoslovakia? Denmark? round about WW II. How about Cuba, Uganda, Ireland and Bermuda?) The citizens of Massachusetts, coming to their senses, voted down this 1976 "chance" to free their state of weapons. Of course, one of Ed's co- supporters of the bill, Sheriff John Buckley, wrote, "Banning handguns is not a device for fighting crime," so maybe the citizens believed him more than Kennedy. It does make one wonder why he supported the bill (which would also have disarmed off-duty police officers) if it wasn't a crime- fighting measure, which so far is the apparent justification for the attempt. I have succumbed, however, to the penchant for not believing politicians, so I couldn't speculate. Adrienne Regard