Penny Okamoto of Ceasefire Oregon presented a case for partially disarming America (“Weapons of war loose on our streets,” The Outlook, July 31) that is full of misinformation.

As an honorably retired deputy sheriff of Multnomah County, not a member of the NRA, I’d like to take this opportunity to set the record straight.

As a sheriff’s deputy, I served the citizens of this community for 25 years, mostly in functions of patrol, where I continuously faced the dangers Okamoto says can be overcome by citizen disarmament.

My success as a deputy was based on focusing on the bad people, and not being distracted by those who were no trouble.

Primarily, I do not find it a persuasive argument to simply say that if laws are passed that outlaw guns, that bad people won’t get their hands on firearms.

Here are a few things I’d like you to know regarding firearms and their place in American society.

n Some people say repeating arms are only meant for war. This mantra is new with the shooting in Aurora, Colo. But police use these weapons, as do people involved in shooting competitions. Do these activities count as war?

n The first widely-adopted rapid-fire weapon was the Mauser semi-auto pistol, developed just before the turn of the 20th century, well before World War I. Semi-auto firearm designs date back to the 1840s.

I owned a Winchester Model 1901, which was a semi-auto, magazine-fed rifle designed for hunting large game. The rifle had a five-round capacity, which could be fired in a little more than a second.

n The M-16 is not primarily a machine gun. It is too lightly built, like its cousin the AK-47. The designation “machine gun” is a military term reserved for battle weapons that can handle sustained full-auto fire, and the M-16 and AK-47 are battle carbines, with full-auto capability, but are incapable of sustained full-auto fire, and are not machine guns.

n The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 prohibited some semi-auto manufacture, but left open the manufacture of many more semi-auto rifles, especially those manufactured in Connecticut and Massachusetts, which two of its major sponsors represented, ironically or hypocritically, your choice.

n Some will argue — including Okamoto of Ceasefire Oregon — that every weapon is a “weapon of war.” Okamoto paints all of them with her broad brush.

But war is nothing more than organized deadly conflict between parties, and anything that can be used to create casualties is a weapon of war — food, money and politics can be just as deadly.

n Any hunter can train him or herself to kill game with a single-shot firearm; no one argues that point. But that fact does not obviate the requirement some have for being able to fire more than one shot while hunting. Sometimes it takes two or more shots.

The right to bear arms

Okamoto’s op-ed was mostly the standard argument you’d expect from the anti-gun camp. So I’ll do the same from the point of view of the standard pro-gun crowd.

The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights makes it a civil right to keep and bear arms, which were defined by the founders as weapons of the infantry soldier.

The Glock pistol, the AK-47 and the AR-15 (a derivative of the Army’s M-16 family of firearms) are all modern weapons of the infantry soldier.

The founders specifically wanted that every citizen who could bear infantry weapons be allowed to do so, as a check on the central government, should it decide, as it had in England, to disarm its citizens.

To the people who share Okamoto’s view that we should give up this civil right, I ask this: Which civil right do you want to abrogate next?

George Schneider is a Gresham resident.