Henson Ong - Senate Gun Control Hearings

"Gun control does not work. Your own history is replete with high school rifle teams, Boy Scout, Marksmanship merit badges. You can buy rifles at hardware stores. You could order them, mail order delivered 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 the availability of guns suddenly exploded or increased, it actually was decreased. What was changed was societal decay."
Henson Ong

January 2013

Transcript - Henson Ong:

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

(applause)

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 replete with high school rifle teams, Boy Scout, Marksmanship merit badges. You can buy rifles at hardware stores. You could order them, mail order delivered 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 the availability of guns suddenly exploded or increased, it actually was decreased. What was changed was societal decay.

(applause)

If gun control actually did work; Washington DC and Chicago would be the safest cities in your nation, but it is not. They have the toughest gun laws and the highest crime and murder rates.

Now, some people have asked and called the AR-15, they called AR-15 a weapon of mass killing. Well, 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 in 5.56 NATO with a 30 round magazine is suitable for personal defensive of use. I have documentation on that; it is HSCEMS-1212-00011 Solicitation 4, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Now who needs an AR-15 with 30 round mags? That question has also been brought up. And 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 neighborhoods. Theirs stood because they stood their ground. I would also put forward the conjecture that had the 10,000 students at Tiananmen Square not been unarmed; things may not have resulted in so many of them disappearing.

In your own laws, United States v. Miller, 309 U.S. 174 (1939), it was made clear that the type 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.

(applause)

Excuse me Mr. Ong, if you would…

[Henson Ong] In Lewis v. United States (1980) it is stated that the Second Amendment guarantees no right to keep and bear a firearm 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 as per the 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 expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time. The AR-15 is the most common and popular rifle in America at this time.

Would you please wrap up?

[Henson Ong] I will wrap up. I would like to wrap up with a statement from Judge Andrew Kozinski in Silveira v. Lockyer (2003) “My excellent colleges have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny 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.”

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