Democrats Don't Know Enough About Guns To Have Opinions About Gun Control.
Also Known As: They barely know the Shootey end from the Grippey end.
This is Almost Certainly Going to be an Evergreen Post
It’s not uncommon for legislators to legislate on topics that they have no real experience about. I talked about section 230 a few years back - The average age of a congressman is 58, the average age of a senator is 64, what are the chances, do you think, that they actually know anything about the nuances of technology?
But perhaps there’s no better example than firearms. Democrats more often than not have no conception under God what they’re talking about, whether it’s a journalist who thinks that it’s easier to buy a gun than cough medicine and then fails their background check in surprise, a national magazine that thinks a chainsaw bayonet is a normal attachment for an AR-15, or a TV personality that thinks that a bullet from an AR “obliterates” what it hits…. They don’t know the terms. They don’t know the specifications. They don’t know how things work. And yet, they all have very strong opinions on gun control.
This is because they don’t care about the specific restrictions they’re advocating for. It’s not about striking a balance between responsible gun control and the rights of Americans to bear arms… They just want to ban guns, and every bit of restriction gets them closer to that goal. They don’t need to know what the implements are called, or what they do, or why they do that, it’s attached to a murder stick and should be gone.
One of the best mask off moments I’ve ever had was on Ethics Alarms, I asked Charles Green if there was a level of gun control he would criticize, and he said something to the effect of “I’d have problems with legislation that targeted water pistols”.
I can think of no better example than this:
Some Context For That Tweet
This was in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting, where a man fired over 1000 rounds of ammunition into a crowd, killing 60 and injuring 400, from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel before turning a handgun on himself.
The jab at the NRA was in reference to a law being passed through congress that would lessen the restrictions on suppressors.
What’s Wrong With It?
Three things:
First: She got the name of the device wrong.
Normally, I wouldn’t gripe about semantics. It’s not really important if someone thinks the A in AR-15 stands for “Assault” when it actually stands for “Armalite”. That’s trivia. It shows a certain amount of disinterest in getting information and being right, but it doesn’t really matter. I think “silencer” instead of “suppressor” is a problem though, because it actually gives people a warped idea of what the thing does.
Which bleeds into my second point:
She doesn’t know what a suppressor does.
People say silencer after having watched too many action movies. They get this idea that a suppressor turns a gun into a covert death machine. The most recent John Wick movie is a great example: There’s a scene where John and another assassin are trading shots in a busy subway station, and no one around seems to notice.
Complete Bullshit.
A suppressor is designed to lower the decibels of a shot from about 150 to about 110. For reference, that takes the sound down from about that of a jet engine (although much less sustained) to merely that of a working chainsaw (although much less sustained). People could ask: What’s the point then? If it doesn’t actually silence your shot, why use a suppressor? This is a great question, and it has an obvious answer: Sounds over 110 decibels can cause immediate and lasting hearing damage, the suppressor, by dampening the sound to 110ish and reducing muzzle flare, acts as eye and ear PPE. Which might be why the law that Hillary was talking about was called “The Hearing Protection Act”. And that bleeds into my third point:
What she said was factually untrue.
You could argue: “Hey, Jeff… Sure, she didn’t know what it was called, and sure, she doesn’t know what it does, but was she actually wrong? Would suppressors have made the shooter more deadly? Maybe with less muzzle flash or with less sound, he might have shot better, or people might have been more confused?”
And the answer is: “Probably not”, from the distance we’re talking about, I don’t think he was aiming so much as praying to begin with, and again… I don’t think anyone would be confused about what was happening because those guns would have still been loud.
But let’s say for a second that he did use a suppressor. Again: familiarity with the device is key. A suppressor converts sound and light energy from gasses discharged by the shot into heat and disburses that heat down the barrel of the firearm. If you fired 10 shots in quick succession through a suppressor, even in a small caliber firearm, the barrel would be hot enough to cook an egg on. If someone was stupid enough to attach a suppressor to a .223 and fired it 1000 times in quick succession, the barrel would melt. Well, actually, the suppressor would probably fail first. Really… I think that a suppressor on those guns would probably be more likely to cause a misfire than additional confusion. It could have saved lives.
I just want to put that all together:
Hillary Clinton, Senator, Secretary of State, Presidential nominee, got on a platform where she has 30 million followers and spoke authoritatively to the American people. She didn’t know what the device she was talking about was called, What the device does, or how it does it, and so mislead her followers into believing what might actually have been the opposite of what was true, because she wanted to make a point about a bill designed to make personal protective equipment more available.
When you can barely distinguish the shootey end of the gun from the grippey end, you probably shouldn’t be talking about what might make them safer, nevermind preaching down the bridge of your nose to millions of people or attempting to influence legislation on it.