Orwellian Newspeak knows no party lines

Yesterday, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell opportunistically used the tragic death of Police Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski to call for a return to the so-called assault weapons ban that expired in 2004. (Never mind that the Chinese weapon that actually killed Stephen Liczbinski was imported before the ban and therefore would have been legal.)

There's no reason to be surprised at Fast Eddie being opportunistic, but it does give me the opportunity to point out that neither Republicans nor Democrats have any scruples whatsoever about coining misleading phrases to con voters into accepting (and even supporting) a point of view that has no basis in fact or reality.

This weapons ban, for example, as accurately reported by USA Today, was a ban on "the manufacture and sale of 19 semiautomatic assault weapons." These weapons are most commonly referred to as assault-style weapons.

But what the American public misses is that the key word is not assault, it's semi-automatic.

True assault weapons have a full-automatic capability: they act like machine guns and will keep firing automatically as long as you (a) depress the trigger and (b) still have rounds in the magazine.

Semi-automatic weapons--no matter how their exterior shapes are designed--require one trigger pull to fire each bullet.

No army in the world considers a weapon limited to semi-automatic fire to be an assault weapon.

Nor is there any functional distinction between such semi-automatic assault-style weapons and semi-automatic hunting rifles or older military rifles that are not bolt-operated.

The term assault-style weapons is a fragment of Orwellian Newspeak: a fallacious term created to scare people into action (or to convince people that some meaningful action has been taken).

It is the liberal, gun-control equivalent of the social conservative, pro-life partial-birth abortion.

So-called partial-birth abortions are exceptionally rare late-term abortions that in fact carry significant enough health risks to the mother as a procedure that they are only used in cases of significant risk of the life or health of the mother. Throughout all the years of debate, what has been conspicuous by its absence is any data proving that malicious pregnant women or scheming doctors are using this procedure as anything other than it was intended: a less-than-satisfactory option in a deteriorating situation.

But because the body of an (almost always) non-viable fetus is pulled through the birth canal first, this has allowed abortion rights opponents to create an horrific term (that goes along with lurid descriptions of killing babies) to cloud the real issue: a slippery-slope attack on abortion rights.

Assault-style weapons.

Partial-birth abortion.

Here's my proposition for all my friends of good will from all political persuasions: let's stop allowing our own sides to use this pernicious and misleading double-speak. Let's actually have the guts to stand up and talk accurately about what we mean, without resorting to these code words that are so destructive to a functioning democracy.

I said (somewhere, I can't find the post right now) about two months ago that I would stop calling myself Pro-Choice because it was a euphemism, and a cowardly one at that. I believe in abortion rights for women.

Likewise, I'd challenge my friends on the other side of gun control issues to have the courage to come out and say, "I support a ban on semi-automatic rifles."

If we have to resort to the tactics of 1984 to win support for our positions, doesn't that say something, both about us as individuals and the quality of the position we're advocating?