Obama Doesn’t Know Anything About Guns, Either

Last night I noted the absurd case of Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette, who has sponsored legislation to ban many, if not most, of the firearms magazines now sold in the United States, but does not know what a magazine is. Today it turned out that Barack Obama, who has campaigned tirelessly for gun control legislation over the last several months, doesn’t know the first thing about firearms either. Daniel Halper noticed this transcript of Obama’s speech at a fundraiser yesterday in San Francisco on the White House’s web site:

Now, over the next couple of months, we’ve got a couple of issues: gun control. (Applause.) I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon — by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.

This is painfully elementary: all of the weapons that reportedly were used by Adam Lanza were semiautomatic. Possession of a fully automatic weapon requires a special license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It has never been reported that Lanza’s mother had such a license or owned any fully automatic firearms. Nor is there any apparent reason why local law enforcement authorities would conceal the use of a fully automatic weapon, if that had been the case. No: Barack Obama is one more example of a gun-control advocate who has no idea what he is talking about. One of the reasons why the current gun control campaign has fallen so flat is, I think, that it has been apparent to many people that the gun control advocates are generally ignorant of the subject matter.