In the wake of the deadly Orlando mass shooting, Americans can't simply grieve and process the evil within one person who could take innocent lives in such a horrific way. Instead of focusing on the "why" he killed, some among us would prefer to concentrate on the "how," beginning the immediate mantra that guns are evil and until we eradicate this cancer in our lives, mass killings will continue.
These same people advocated for the abolishment of fertilizer after the horrific Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that claimed the lives of 168 people. Likewise, in 2001, they went after box cutters and planes when the Twin Towers came down, claiming over 3000+ souls. In 2013, pressure cookers were under heavy scrutiny after the Boston Marathon bombing, killing three and wounding over 260 people. Oh wait . . . no . . . that's not right. In each of these cases, the consensus was that all of these perpetrators of evil adhered to a vile ideology driving the terrorism they committed.
In walks Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), who claims to CNN's Erin Burnett, it wasn't just the gun that committed the horror at the Pulse Night Club in Orlando - it was the type of gun, an AR-15:
"If [Matteen] was not able to buy a weapon that shoots off 700 rounds in a minute, a lot of those people would still be alive. That’s exactly right. If somebody like him had nothing worse to deal with than a Glock pistol…he might have killed three or four people and not 50. It’s way too easy to kill people in America today and we have to think long and hard about what to do about that.”700 rounds per minute? Why not say 900, like Slate does when noting that gun modification "add ons" up the rounds fired per minute? Perhaps because no evidence has surfaced that the Orlando shooter modified his gun. However . . . the narrative. As long as these weapons exist, Americans can expect more mass shootings which is true. Certainly if we ban such weapons in the United States, no more mass shootings will occur. Oh wait . . . that didn't stop the Paris Terror Attack shootings.
Grayson wasn't the only one to hop on the gun-blame game train. Piers Morgan chimed in as well:
Here's me firing an AR-15 for 1st time.— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) June 13, 2016
Go to 2m & see how fast I end up shooting.https://t.co/Ho12fIgSQF #orlando #killingmachineguns
For those of us who do not own an AR-15 nor have personally experienced its firing capabilities, what exactly is the design of this gun?Yes any semi-auto will go as fast as your finger does, you debate dodging coward. https://t.co/TVS5M2qV68— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) June 13, 2016
IJ Review's Joe Perticone explains that an AR-15 is not an assault rifle, since an assault rifle can switch between semi-automatic and automatic settings, while the AR-15 is solely a semi-automatic weapon and therefore . . . can only fire as many times as the trigger is pulled. This makes it impossible for the AR-15 to fire "700 rounds in a minute" as Grayson suggests. Perticone's full breakdown of the AR-15 can be read here.
Them facts, though - pesky reminders that fearmongering never
provides positive solutions.
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