Dear editor:

Edna Foster’s suggestion that we should outlaw automatic weapons is really unnecessary because automatic weapons like the ones used in the San Bernardino massacre have been banned by federal law since Al Capone and friends used machine guns in the 1920s.

The Islamic terrorists who killed 17 and wounded 14 bought legal, nonautomatic rifles — in a state that has some of the most severe gun regulations — and illegally modified them into fully automatic weapons. These same terrorists had made a quantity of pipe bombs, which are also against federal law.

The ban on both of these didn’t seem to prevent the mechanically adept terrorists from making the weapons they needed to kill people they consider infidels.

I guess we could ban the pipes and the nuts, bolts and screwdrivers used to convert the rifles. We also could ban pressure cookers since that is what the Boston Marathon Islamic terrorists used to make their bombs, or maybe we should wait and see how Great Britain does with their ban on “pointy knives.”

No, the only way that would have prevented these ISIS operatives from killing innocent people in the United States would have been to keep them out of our country.

Mike Waller

Troup County