With tragic mass shootings in the news, the Left has become more focused than ever on
expanding gun control.
But as they get more and more riled up about guns, they become looser and looser with their
facts, repeatedly making false or misleading claims about basic firearms knowledge.
One of the left's biggest pushes is for a so-called Assault Weapons Ban. Hillary Clinton,
House Democrats, and a number of left-wing anti-gun advocacy groups have advocated for
it, and a ban is supported by 91% of self-identified Democrats according to a recent Quinnipiac Poll.
But "assault weapon" is not a well-defined term—anti-gun politicians basically use
it to mean "guns that look scary."
Seven states have assault weapons bans in place, and they all define them in
different ways.
The most common characteristics used to define assault weapons are ultimately cosmetic in nature,
things such as a pistol grip, a bayonet lug, or a barrel shroud, which don't
make the gun any more lethal than guns that are excluded from such bans.
Even anti-gun former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, founder of the influential anti-gun
advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, which is pushing for an assault weapons ban, admitted
that banning assault weapons would have a marginal impact on homicide death.
On an interview on CBS This Morning in 2013, he stated the numbers current at the time;
only a couple hundred people a year are killed with so-called assault weapons, whereas about 12,000
are killed with handguns.
We could also look at the left's criticism of so-called semi-automatic weapons—also known as
nearly every gun in use.
Many on the left don't seem to know the difference between a semi-automatic and automatic
firearm.
An automatic weapon keeps firing for as long as you hold the trigger, like a machine gun,
but a semi-automatic weapon merely reloads the next bullet after you fire one—a system
used in almost all pistols in common use.
Yet still 77% of Democrats would support banning ALL semi-automatic weapons according to a
2016 Morning Consult Poll.
So what about banning uncommon automatic weapons?
Celebrities including Seth MacFarlane and Susan Sarandon have tweeted out calls to ban
automatic weapons, and Senator Bernie Sanders called for an end to the sale of automatic weapons
on NBC's Meet the Press.
One problem: they've already been extremely regulated since 1934, and the sale of new machine
guns, that was banned in 1986!
There may be some reasonable, common sense firearm policies we could all agree on.
But if you want to find out what they are, why would you ever listen to advocates who
get basic facts wrong?
I'm Michael Watson.
To learn more, watch or listen to episode 15 of the Influence Watch Podcast.
Thanks for watching.
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