When a politician who abhors our freedom talks guns they can say some absurd things.
“America is going to get a lot less safe,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said after a court ruling that found firearm schematics for 3-D printers can be shared online. Schumer then said those firearms “are not only scary, they’re outright dangerous in the way they can mimic the look and the capacity of a hardened, fully semi-automatic weapon.”
By “fully semi-automatic weapon,” perhaps he meant machine guns, which have been heavily regulated since 1934. As for “hardened,” well that’s anyone’s guess. Regardless of what he meant, Schumer was most certainly referring to modern sporting rifles, such as very popular AR-15s with his reference to “semi-automatic weapon.” Schumer, and other anti-gun politicians and media members, like to pretend that modern sporting rifles are the same as M4 carbines used by the U.S. military. They then spin this to say that American citizens shouldn’t have “weapons of war.”
It means nothing to them that modern sporting rifles are not machine guns. They also don’t seem to realize that throughout American history citizens have always used gun designs that are similar to those used by the U.S. armed forces. They also don’t seem to realize that many of the innovations in firearms and related products the U.S. armed forces use have been developed and extensively vetted in the American marketplace before being adopted by the U.S. military.
Still, there is also a heavy helping of hypocrisy to this story.
In March of 2011 Schumer put a press release on his website titled “Schumer: 40-50 New Jobs Coming to Remington’s Manufacturing Plant in Ilion” that said, “Today, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer joined Remington officials and plant employees to announce that Bushmaster Firearms is relocating a manufacturing facility from Windham, Maine, to Ilion, N.Y., bringing over 40 new jobs to central New York in the process. Schumer has been a long-time supporter of manufacturing at the Remington plant, urging top Army officials to open up competition for the Army’s small arms contracts to other U.S. manufacturers and domestic producers across the country like the Ilion, N.Y.-based Remington. Today, Schumer applauded Remington’s decision to add new jobs to the productive and capable workforce already making the factory an economic powerhouse in the Mohawk Valley.”
Bushmaster makes AR-15s. These are the same guns Schumer calls “assault weapons” and wants to ban nationally. On CBS’ show “Face the Nation” on Dec. 16, 2012, Schumer said we need to “reinstate the assault-weapons ban.” He said this knowing he’d never be challenged for hypocrisy by Bob Schieffer or any other mainstream news journalist. He knows such journalists mostly support him, but he also knows they don’t have a clue about this issue.
Bushmaster soon left New York after the state banned the sale of these popular rifles in 2013 with its Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (S.A.F.E.) Act, but Schumer didn’t put out a press release on that.
