Henson Ong at Gun Violence Prevention Public Hearing - Hartford, CT

Henson Ong at Gun Violence Prevention Public Hearing - Hartford, CT



My name is Henson Ong.  Forgive me, English is not my first language  I am a legal immigrant and an American by choice.

Thank you for giving me this opportunity to express my opinion and give my testimony in opposition to the majority of the proposed bills which do nothing to deter future crimes.

Gun control does not work.  Your own history is re pleat with high school rifle teams, and boy scout [rifle] merit badges. You could buy rifles at hardware stores.  You could mail order them to your home.  Your country was awash in readily available firearms and ammunition and yet in your past you did not have mass school shootings.  Other people have already expressed the question.  What changed?

It was not that the availability of guns suddenly increased, it was actually decreased.  What was changed was societal decay.  If gun control actually did work, Washington DC and Chicago would be the safest cities in your nation but it is no.  They have the toughest gun laws and the highest crime and murder rates.

Now some people have called the AR-15 a weapon of mass killing.  It turns out that there are a few government agencies which disagree with that characterization.  The department of Homeland Security has stated that a rifle chambered inn 5.56 NATO with a 30 round magazine is suitable for personal defense.  HSCEMS-1212-00011 solicitation 4, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Now how needs an Ar-15 with 30 round magazines?  That question has also been brought up.  I would like to put forward that had the Koreans in the LA Riots not had AR-15s and AK-47s with 30 round magazines, and Rugers 30s, their businesses would have been burned to the ground like all of the other businesses in their neighborhood.  Theirs stood because they stood their ground.

I would also put forward the conjecture that, had the 10,000 students in Tienanmen square not been unarmed, things may not have resulted in so many of them disappearing.

In your own laws, United States vs Miller 309US174 1939, it was made clear that the types of firearms protected by the Second Amendment were those specifically useful and common for military use in defense of the state.  I would like to note that the state is not the government, the state is the people.

In Lewis VS United States 1980, it is stated that the Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearms that does not have some reasonable relationship to the preservation and efficiency of a well regulated militia.  It has nothing to do with hunting.

The militia debates in the convention shows plainly enough that it is composed of all males physically capable of acting in concert for common defense; And further that ordinarily, when called for service, these men were to appear, bearing arms supplied by themselves, and of a kind in use at the time.  The RA-15 is the most common and popular rifle in America at this time.

I would like to wrap up with a statement from Judge Alex Kozinski in  Silveira v. Lockyer 2003:

"My excellent colleges have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.  the prospect of tyrannt may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime usually do.  But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late.  The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision; One designed only for those exceptionally rare circumstances when all other rights have failed.  A free people can only afford to make this mistake once."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyYYgLzF6zU