Yes, it gets high numbers in polling. Yes, support for stricter gun laws spikes after horrific shootings, like the one that struck Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14 that left 17 people dead and at least a dozen wounded. In the end, support dips below 50 percent. Why? Well, I would like to think it’s due to people who know what they’re talking about educating the public on the implications of new gun laws being proposed by anti-gun Democrats and how they would be ineffective in stopping future mass shootings. We have a constitutional right to own firearms. Gun culture is American culture—not all of it of course, but it’s played a huge role in the history of this country. Liberals have yet to deal with it.
So, what provision am I talking about? It’s the proposal to ban semi-automatic weapons, which would be a total gun ban if enacted by Congress. First, this will never happen. Second, semi-automatic is not a scary term. The media has gotten worse when it comes to terminology, which is now arguably done to beef up these polls. They have had time and again to get their act together on basic facts; they refuse. If there is any explicit example of the true Democrat-media complex that the late Andrew Breitbart mentioned in his work, it’s the media and the anti-gun left’s unholy alliance when it comes to gun control.
Semi-automatic merely means self-reloading. That is to say, the one round fired per trigger pull. The energy from the blast that ejects the round pushes the slide back, which then simultaneously ejects a round, while the next round from the magazine is pushed into position to be chambered as the slide comes forward. With the exception of revolvers and other firearms considered to be antiques, every handgun available on the civilian market is semiautomatic. The AR-15 is also a semiautomatic weapon. It’s the same firing system as say a Sig Sauer P226 or a Colt 1911 in the sense that all three fire one round per trigger pull. The only difference here is the AR-15 looks scary to liberals.
Some Democrats surely want this. A lot of progressives feel the same way, regardless of the firing system because they want to gut the Second Amendment. But Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who is a die-hard gun control advocate and hard-core liberal, admitted that Congress is not going to push for a total ban on semiautomatics, though he did say he supports a new ban on so-called assault weapons. He said so yesterday on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper (via Free Beacon):
"I support a ban on assault weapons and assault weapons are defined by state law. Not as all semiautomatic weapons," Murphy said.
The Connecticut senator then said that assault weapons look like automatic weapons even though they're semiautomatic and have bullets that exit guns three times faster than handguns.
"As doctors have described, post Parkland, they do something to your insides that a bullet coming out of a revolver doesn't," he said.
Murphy finished by saying "I don't think we're talking about a ban on all semiautomatic weapons. I think we're talking about very tightly defined assault weapons that make the semiautomatic weapons turn into weapons of mass destruction."
[…]
His appearance follows a trend of other Democratic lawmakers saying they don't support a ban on all semiautomatic weapons, including Rep. Dan Kildee (Mich.) and Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.).
On Wednesday, the network had a town hall event in Sunrise, Florida, one of the most liberal parts of the state, where students and faculty of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were allowed time to ask politicians and NRA officials questions. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch attended the event, which devolved into an Orwellian two minutes of hate against law-abiding gun owners, the Second Amendment, Republicans, and the NRA itself. It was the personification of the gun debate—people just yelling at each other (though one side is totally wrong and it’s not the NRA). It showed the confiscatory ethos that’s embedded within the left on gun politics, which is why Murphy’s remarks, while more grounded than other anti-gun leftists, will be met with distrust outside the D.C. Beltway.
Nevertheless, Murphy just proved Rubio right. Rubio was torched by the audience for not supporting a new so-called assault weapons ban, in which semiautomatics get looped into this proposal.
Banning all semi-auto weapons may have been popular with the audience at #CNNTownHall, but it is a position well outside the mainstream https://t.co/18rMDwEfGs
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 22, 2018