[Defender968]

I vehemently agree x SF med, so much so that I just tried to send an email to every member of the Judiciary committee where this stinking bill currently resides, unfortunately they don't make that easy to do.

Of the 40 members of the Judiciary committee I only got email addresses to 3 when clicking on the contact me link on each of their websites. On the judiciary committee website there is no way to contact all (not that it surprises me). So I started going down their list one by one, on most I had to guess at their address as the vast majority of them asked for your name and address and had a zip code authenticator that basically blocked you if you are not in their district. So I punched in their first and last name with the mail.hous.gov domain and hit send, 12 went through, 28 bounced.

Trent Franks,Steven King, Maxine Waters, Randy Forbes, Jackson Lee, Darrell Issa, Zoe Lofgren, Dan Lungren, Robert Scott, Elton Gallegly, James Sensenbrenner, Lamar Smith, Dan Maffei, Debbie Schultz, Linda Sanchez, Adam Schiff, Charles Gonzalez, Tammy Baldwin Gregg Harper Brad Sherman Tom Rooney, Luis Gutierrez, Jason Chaffetz, Pedro Pierluisi Ted Poe, Hank Johnson, Jim Jordan, and Robert Wexler all bounced, if any of these are your rep please shoot them an email, or if you can get their email PM me and I'll more than happy to email them myself. I tried to google them but just kept getting their websites. Maybe I should file a FOIA for the congressional email roster, of course on one of the ones that went through I got this response

Thank you for your message to Congressman Howard L. Berman. Due to Congressional courtesy, we will only respond to email from constituents of the 28th Congressional District. Therefore, to ensure delivery, if you did not
include your name and complete mailing address in the email, please resend the message with this information and then, Congressman Berman will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

So maybe it wouldn't even matter if I got their email addresses correct.

Here is the email I've sent already,

My name is XXXX XXXXXX and I have just become aware of a House bill that has been sent to your committee: H.R. 45, Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. First let me give you a little history on me, I am a current member of the Army National Guard and am formerly a member of the U.S. Air Force and Air Force Reserves. I spent more than two of the first four years of my marriage deployed to the Middle East or TDY helping to protect our freedom. The past four years I have been a South Carolina certified Law Enforcement Officer serving with the XXXXXX Police Department. I have personally seen both sides of the coin with regard to gun violence: I have seen law abiding citizens protect themselves, their families and their possessions from criminals with a firearm, and I have seen criminals assault and even kill others with illegal guns.

I have read H.R. 45 and am adamantly opposed to this regulation and I will explain why. It will do nothing to stop gun crimes period. All this bill will do is punish law abiding citizens who own firearms.

Criminals by far and large get their guns from two sources. The first and by far most prominent is by either stealing a gun or buying a stolen gun on the streets. The second way criminals get guns is through straw purchases, where they get someone else to buy the gun for them. When a criminal steals a gun or buys a stolen gun they are not going to apply for a permit to buy or own, in fact they’re not going to fill out any paperwork, they know they are already breaking the law by simply possessing a firearm as most of them are all ready convicted felons. In XXXXXXX, S.C. we showed that 80% of all crime is committed by less than 10% of the populace, most of which have been through the criminal justice system multiple times and are already convicted felons and as such cannot legally own a firearm. These criminals are the ones who do gun violence and who need to be focused on, not the law abiding citizens. H.R. 45 does absolutely nothing to address these criminals, or to stop these people from acquiring guns, the reality is criminals will always be able to steal firearms, and we already have laws on the books that make straw purchases illegal and which makes possession of a firearm by a convicted felon illegal.

Now I explained I am a veteran, and as such I value our freedom very highly as I have personally sacrificed a great deal for it and I have seen firsthand countries that do not enjoy the freedoms that we do in the U.S. This bill is nothing more than an assault on the 2nd Amendment rights of law abiding citizens. This bill is not about stopping gun crime, it does nothing more than to add a burden on gun owners with licenses and registrations that will not apply to criminals as they do not follow laws, that’s why they’re called criminals.

I further believe that this bill, H.R. 45 is not intended to protect anyone from illegal guns, what it is intended to do is to be the first step towards making all guns illegal. Our forefathers had the wisdom to put the 2nd Amendment in the Constitution for good reason. I’m not going to get into the constitutionality of firearm ownership, what I will tell you is that as a law enforcement officer I know the limitations of the police with regard to protecting citizens from violent criminals. When seconds count during a violent crime, we the police are minutes away. This in and of itself is enough reason to allow law abiding citizens to own firearms in my opinion, and to take the guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens only ensures a safe work environment for criminals who will become more brazen if their prey are unarmed. England has found this to be the case as their crime rates have increased 340% since they banned firearms in 1998. There are literally dozens of case studies that prove this exact fact.

This bill is not only a mistake, it is dangerous, and must not be passed.

Thank you,

XXXX XXXXXXX