"There's absolutely no reason I can see having these weapons out on the street," says Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez, a former police officer and police director.
Faced with Somohano's death from a legally bought assault weapon and 12 other murders this year in Miami (15 last year) from such weapons, the NRA falls back on its favorite defense when there's a dead body: splitting hairs about makes and models of weapons.
LaBeet's weapon wasn't a fully-automatic assault rifle with a cyclic rate of 600 rounds per minute as the Miami Herald alleges, says the shop talk on the NRA web site, it was a semi-automatic!
And even though a fully-automatic rifle might be capable of firing 10 rounds per second, it would require 19 or 20 magazine changes which--depending on how many rounds were loaded into standard-capacity 30-round magazines (typically, only 28 or 29 rounds are loaded, for improved reliability)--would require almost all of that one minute!
So you see Your Honor, no crime has been committed.
Nor is it likely the NRA can revive its pre-Cho campaigns for the right to bring weapons to work, to parks and on school yards. (The business community in Georgia is still thanking Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle for "refusing to go along with the so called 'parking lot gun bill' despite heavy lobbying from the NRA during a late night session," in April. )
No, it's a new day for the NRA with a new sheriff coming to town who may not be sympathetic to the gun lobby--or even a white male.
