Misplaced distrust of so-called "assault weapons"

Here we go again:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Friday that she will reintroduce legislation banning assault weapons after a [L.A.] city maintenance worker was reported to have shot and killed two fellow employees with an AK-47 assault rifle.

'Once again, we've seen the tragic consequences of the ready availability of assault weapons throughout our society,' Feinstein, a California Democrat, said in a statement.

You've just gotta love how the gun grabbers so eagerly overlook obvious considerations in introducing such knee-jerk legislation. Number one, even after the federal "assault weapons" ban expired, California still has a state law on the books banning the same rifles - so this guy was already breaking the law, why does a federal ban need to be re-introduced? Number two, the so-called "assault rifles" that are banned by the state law and that were banned by the federal law, being semi-automatic (not "machine guns" no matter what politicians and the media try to convince you), are in fact no more dangerous than their legal counterparts - so banning them doesn't change the total firepower legally available, only restricts the choices a law-abiding citizen can make. For number three, read the end of the article:

Sampson and Flores earlier Thursday afternoon had a dispute over Sampson being late for work, police said. Sampson later abandoned his city-owned truck on Interstate 10 in west Los Angeles and took a bus to where he parked his car. He then drove home, changed from his work clothes into a suit, armed himself with the AK-47 and drove to the field office, where he waited for Flores, confronted him and shot him, police alleged.

The guy went home, changed, brought his gun back to work and shot his boss. He didn't go on a shooting rampage, spraying bullets around haphazardly, killing anyone in sight. He went after one very specific individual. He could have accomplished his goal with any type of legal firearm on the market, or even with a knife or baseball bat. The tool he used to commit the crime is insubstantial to the reason the crime was committed, nor did it significantly contribute to the werewithal needed to commit the crime. And yet still the first thing we hear from the gun-grabbers is wailing that "assault rifles" are bad and we need to prevent normal people from owning them as well as criminals.

Just one lesson I'd love to see everyone learn: tools aren't evil, even when put to evil purposes.