Assault weapons ban spotlights local case (SF Chronicle)

[struggle4progress]

Monday, September 13, 2004

... the AK-47 shooting death of San Francisco police Officer Isaac Espinoza is back in the spotlight ... According to law enforcement sources, ballistics tests conducted recently .. found that the assault weapon that killed Espinoza in April had been used in an earlier gang-related shooting ... District Attorney Kamala Harris .. declined to discuss possible evidence linking the murder weapon to a previous unsolved crime ... But the D.A. did offer some very vocal support for Sen. Dianne Feinstein's call to extend the federal ban on .. assault weapons, which expires today ... What's more, she says, the size of the weapons, the speed at which they can be fired and the large number of rounds they hold make them not only "dangerous and scary,'' but especially attractive to gang members looking to be "Rambo'' tough ...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/13/MNR.TMP

[DerBeppo]

1. wow

considering the awb had nothing to do with this case and this happened while the law was intact, it looks like more fear speech from the media.

interesting part of the article:

"While the Espinoza case may be getting most of the publicity, it's just one of 526 criminal cases involving weapons that are being prosecuted by the San Francisco district attorney's office. Of those, just 22 -- or 4.1 percent -- involved assault weapons. Eleven of the assault weapons were used in crimes."

unless it was a drive by bayoneting, i don't see how this is relevant.

[struggle4progress]

2. <snip> But as evidenced by the Espinoza shooting, assault rifles ...

... sometimes also turn up in unsolved crimes that aren't counted as part of the D.A.'s statistics. <snip>

So one point of the article is that the statistics, that you just cited, are questionable.