Gun control: ignorance in search of power |

Gun control: ignorance in search of power |
RealClearPolitics brings us a new intellectual high-water mark in the gun control debate, as Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, a Democrat, makes it clear that she doesn’t really know what a “magazine” is, or how they work – she just knows she wants power over them: ”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.”
Golly, whatever will we do if those cunning criminals – er, excuse me, “persons who choose to operate outside the law,” in accordance with the new Associated Press stylebook – figure out that magazines can be reloaded?
This degree of nitwittery is not uncommon in the gun control debate.
 The anti-gun crowd is having a good day if they can avoid referring to ammunition magazine as “clips.” Barack Obama’s phony statistic about “40 percent of all gun purchases taking place without a background check” – which has been debunked by conservatives many times, but is finally getting a fact-check workover from the mainstream press – could most charitably be described as ignorance of how gun sales work.
I suspect Obama himself knows it isn’t true – his advisers certainly do – and he’s just flogging the lie because it sounds useful.
But a lot of his supporters don’t know it’s untrue, because they have minimal personal experience with the purchase and transfer of firearms.
The hysteria around “assault weapons” is an example of using loaded language to exploit a general lack of knowledge about rifles.
Most of the characteristics that land rifles on the “assault weapons” ban list are cosmetic, with little bearing on the weapon’s effectiveness.
Sometimes gun control zealots like to slip in terms like “military weapons,” to conjure images of rocket launchers and squad automatic weapons tucked into gun racks in the pickup trucks of NRA life members, who are one fender-bender away from pumping entire neighborhoods full of lead.
For that matter, the concept of “semi-automatic” guns is deliberately conflated with fully automatic fire.