WASHINGTON — In a letter sent to the White House, six national gun-banning groups — the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Violence Policy Center, Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, Freedom States Alliance, Legal Community Against Violence, and States United to Prevent Gun Violence — urged President Barack Obama to use his executive powers to ban the import into the U.S. of the FN Herstal Five-seveN semiautomatic pistol.
The Belgian-made Five-seveN was used in the Fort Hood attack earlier this month that left 13 dead and 34 wounded.
The letter said in part, “Under longstanding federal law, ATF has the clear authority to prohibit the importation of any firearm or ammunition unless it is ‘generally recognized as particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes.’ This provision of the 1968 Gun Control Act has historically been used to exclude from import many non-sporting firearms, including so-called ‘Saturday Night Special’ handguns, ‘Street Sweeper’ shotguns, and many foreign-made assault weapons. The FN Five-seveN handgun is clearly the type of firearm to which Congress intended the import restrictions to apply.”
An Important Note for GunReports.Com Readers:
Our goal on this website is to foster a free expression of views while reining in language that crosses the line of civil discourse. Accordingly, the comments areas are intended to expand the knowledge of all users of this site. But site administrators wish to discourage the use of profanity, insults, disrespect, the advocacy of lawlessness, violence or sedition, or attempts to impinge on the rights of others.
While GunReports.Com encourages robust discourse that furthers our understanding of all the issues affecting gun owners, comments that break GunReports.Com’s rules will be removed. In addition, we reserve the right to edit or delete individual comments, and in extreme cases, to ban commenters at our discretion.
–Tim Cole
Publisher, GunReports.Com
