There are roughly 6 million car accidents in the United States every year. Approximately 3 million people are injured and between 30,000 to 40,000 people killed annually in the United States. About 82 people die every day in motor vehicle crashes in the United States; that’s roughly one death every 9 minutes. The financial cost of these crashes is more than $230 billion.

Could you imagine, that in order to solve this tragic problem of lives taken and families destroyed, Congress introduced a bill to ban sports cars? After all, who “needs” a sports car, so why not ban them? Even though they are involved in only a fraction of the deaths and arguably their drivers caused the deaths, not the cars, which only respond to their driver’s actual driving? With no statistics whatsoever to show how many crashes involved sports cars versus regular cars or speeds that only sports cars can go? Stupid, right? Not a very effective way to bring down auto deaths in the United States, is it?

Yet that’s exactly what some in Congress want to do right now: Blame deaths on a certain type of inanimate object and claim if they were banned we would all be safer, regardless of lacking any statistical facts to prove it. Only right now, instead of sports cars, we are talking about semi-automatic firearms called “assault weapons.” This claim is not only ignorant of the facts but a dangerous smoke-and-mirrors alternative to real violence prevention.

Despite their popularity and the millions in circulation, semi-automatic rifles  are one of the least used firearms in crime. In fact, their use in crime is so low, that more people are assaulted and killed in the United States every year with blunt objects and knives than with so-called assault rifles. Think about that. Every time you walk through a kitchen or the rec center, the steak knives and baseball bats you are walking past are more frequently used to assault and kill people in the United States than the big bad “assault weapons,” which “only belong on the battlefield,” that certain grand-standing politicians and media want to demonize.

Don’t believe me? Get away from the propaganda of sources which have a stated agenda and get your facts from sources with the raw, unspun data. Look up Tables 21 and 22 of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and see the facts for yourself. In fact, look all the way back from before, during and after the 1994-2004 assault weapons ban and see how the hard numbers show that that law had no effect on overall rates of violent crime.

There have been arguments made that regardless of overall crime, the statistically rare, yet overtly tragic, mass shootings in recent years are reason enough to ban semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines. What is rarely brought up by the talking heads on TV is the fact it takes three seconds to reload any semi-automatic rifle or pistol, regardless of if the madman’s magazine fired only 7, 10 or 30 rounds before reloading. That time disparity is not going to save anyone’s life, especially inside the confined area of a classroom or movie theater. And if there were no semi-automatic weapons used, even no handguns, when shooting at a room or a hallway of unarmed people with three to six minutes to spare before the police show up, a mass murderer can kill 10 to 30 people with just about any firearm, even a “sporting” bird shotgun or an old-school six shooter.

The fact is, high capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons are not the enablers of mass shootings so many uneducated politicians and activists would like to claim they are.

There is also the legitimate need of such firearms to be available to the law-abiding citizen. Although it’s true that you do not need a high capacity magazine to hunt or target shoot, those activities are not the purpose behind the Second Amendment. Even beyond the Second Amendment’s original intent of keeping a balance of power between those who govern and those who are governed via the militia made up of the American public, individual self defense is a major reason to be against such bans. Magazines holding more than 10 rounds can easily be necessary, as anyone who faces multiple home invaders might find 15 to 30 rounds barely adequate. Not every bullet hits its target even at close range, and not even every well-placed round incapacitates, as any veteran police officer, soldier or ER doctor can attest. You can easily get killed by a wounded home invader when, instead of shooting them again to stop the attack, your gun just went “click.” That, and as stated before, it’s a fact that a deranged gunman doesn’t need a high capacity magazine to kill large numbers of unarmed people in a school, theater or shopping mall. If an armed response from the police is several minutes away, unlike the law abiding home owner discussed above, reloading for the madman shooting unarmed people in a building isn’t an issue. These proposed bans will not stop any tragedies, but will curtail law abiding citizens’ Second Amendment rights in the process.

This is not a Democrat vs. Republican issue, although there are more Democrats supporting gun bans than Republicans. There are those in both parties who rightly disagree with the agenda of another assault weapons ban and a magazine ban. Unlike what the sponsors of the new bans, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Sen. Frank Lautenberg, or even Vice Presiden Joe Biden, will tell you this is not primarily because of monetary pressure from the National Rifle Association.

As stated above, the facts do not support these proposals as viable ways to reduce violent crime or even mass shootings, and many concerned voters are well aware of this. I encourage all concerned citizens to contact their elected officials and demand pragmatic solutions to issues and voice absolute opposition to agendas written to ban law abiding citizen’s rights.