Gun Rights Advocate: Biden’s ‘Buy a Shotgun’ Remark Shows VP’s ‘Complete Ignorance’
(CNSNews.com) – Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, said Thursday that Vice President Joe Biden’s recent remarks about a shotgun being easier for a woman to handle than an AR-15 shows the vice president’s “complete ignorance about the nature of shotguns and AR-15s.”
“The vice president has been making a number of statements lately on firearms. Perhaps his most recent involved his opinion that a shotgun is easier for a woman to handle than an AR-15, and that frankly revealed to many of us the vice president’s complete ignorance about the nature of shotguns and AR-15s,” Pratt said Thursday on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.”
During an online town hall meeting Tuesday sponsored by Facebook and Parents magazine, Biden advised women to buy a shotgun instead of an AR-15 for self-protection.
“You don’t need an AR-15. It’s harder to aim. It’s harder to use, and in fact, you don’t need 30 rounds to protect yourself. Buy a shotgun, buy a shotgun,” the vice president said.
“A shotgun is much more difficult to fire, much more difficult to hold and withstand its recoil than an AR-15, and for the vice president to suggest that a woman would be better off using a shotgun than an AR-15 shows that frankly, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Pratt said about Biden’s comment.
C-SPAN showed a clip of Biden speaking about the 2nd Amendment on Jan. 24.
“But just as you don’t have an individual right to go out and buy an F-15 if you’re a billionaire with ordinates on it, just like you don’t have the right to go and buy an M-1 tank, just like you don’t have a right to buy an automatic weapon, those judgments have been made that there are no … reasonable, societal justification or constitutional justification, for owning them,” the vice president said at the time.
“And so my view is that it is totally a guarantee, not negotiable that I am able to own a weapon for sporting purposes as well as my own protection, but there should be rational limits on the type of weapon I can own that exceed the need, that would go beyond what I need for my protection or legitimate sporting activities,” Biden added.
Pratt said Biden’s remarks about the 2nd Amendment also showed his ignorance.
“Yes, the founders did have a somewhat limited view on what kinds of firearms or what kind of arms were covered by the 2nd Amendment. Their view was that every man … of military age should have a rifle, military rifle, like the M-16 today and own it personally and be required to bring it with him if he were called up to militia duty,” Pratt said.
“The purpose of owning guns for the founders was not that which was articulated by the vice president, which was self-defense or sporting use, but it was protection against tyrannical government. And maybe because the vice president’s in government service now he doesn’t like to think about that possibility, but that’s actually what the 2nd Amendment’s all about,” Pratt added.
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