Perhaps our greatest weapon as gunowners is the invincible ignorance of our opponents. They just can’t be bothered to learn a damn thing about guns, and it leads to comical errors like the New York seven-round magazine limit or, for that matter, the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act.
Representative Diana DeGette, D-Colo., pulled a classic one during a recent Denver Post forum, where she delivered this gem:
“I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”
That particular piece of idiocy drew snickers from the crowd and correction from Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith, who urged people who hadn’t shot a gun to “get to the facts- Let’s be educated as we make this decision.”
Sorry, Sheriff. Legislators who get educated tend not to support dumb ideas. That’s why anti-gun measures are usually crammed through in the dead of night, as in New York, or on some sort of bogus voice vote, the way restrictions on machine guns were added to the Firearms Owners Protection Act.
Undeterred by being laughed out of the hall, the Congresswoman doubled down, trotting her designated mouthpiece out to say the following:
“The Congresswoman has been working on a high-capacity assault magazine ban for years, and has been deeply involved in the issue; she simply misspoke in referring to ‘magazines’ when she should have referred to ‘clips,’ which cannot be reused because they don’t have a feeding mechanism.”
That will be an extremely surprising piece of news to anyone who’s ever shot an M1 or any sort of Mannlicher. Or anyone who’s loaded an AR-15 magazine from a stripper clip, for all that.
You don’t have to be a dope to be an anti-gun legislator, but it sure makes it easier.
