[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
Democratic Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette is a lead sponsor of the House legislation to limit magazine capacity to 10 rounds, saying, according to the Denver Post, that “it’s one of her top priorities.” But at a forum sponsored by the paper yesterday “the senior congresswoman from Denver appeared to not understand how guns work.”
Asked how a ban on magazines holding more than 15 rounds would be effective in reducing gun violence, DeGette said:
“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.”
What she didn’t appear to understand is that a magazine can be reloaded with more bullets….
If this had been revealed two days ago readers might understandably dismiss it as an April Fool’s spoof. Unfortunately, Rep. DeGette appears to be a fool every day of the year.
UPDATE [5 April]
There is one possibly extenuating thing that can be said in defense of Rep. DeGette: she appears to know as much about guns as President Obama. He’s been as busy trying to outlaw “assault weapons” as she has with magazines, but like her he has no idea what he’s trying to prohibit. The Weekly Standard just reported this excerpt from a transcript of the president’s remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser this week:
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.
There have been no reports to date — none — of Adam Lanza having or using “a fully automatic weapon” at Sandy Hook. Even CNN knows that his Bushmaster AR-15 “is a semiautomatic, firing one bullet per squeeze of the trigger.”
Moral: politicians who mis-speak mislead and mis-legislate.
