BIDEN’S RATIONALE FOR BANNING AR-STYLE RIFLES

“The cops are coming to us and saying, ‘We’re being outgunned. We’re being outgunned.’”

On Monday, Anthony Licata of Field & Stream interviewed Vice President Joe Biden on gun control. Biden’s rationale for banning AR-style rifles was threefold: (1) The cops are outgunned; (2) Hunters don’t need them; and (3) shotguns are better for self-defense.

Biden’s main point was to tell Licata that “The cops are coming to us and saying, ‘We’re being outgunned. We’re being outgunned.’” He repeated the mantra that the cops are being outgunned several times during the interview.

The vice president also told Licata that hunters did not need AR-style rifles with 30 round magazines. Biden said, “If you have to go up into the Poconos and go bear hunting or deer hunting with that weapon, and you need a clip that has 30 rounds in it, then you shouldn’t be hunting. You’re a danger to yourself. If you can’t get the bear or the deer in four or five shots, you’ve got a problem.”

Biden said that when a California man asked him how he could protect himself other than with an assault rifle in the event of an earthquake, he told him “Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.”

Biden went on to tell Licata that “Most people can handle a shotgun a hell of a lot better than they can a semiautomatic weapon in terms of both their aim and in terms of their ability to deter people coming. We can argue whether that’s true or not, but it is no argument that, for example, a shotgun could do the same job of protecting you.”

If “you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.” Well now, the Washington Times reports that on the same day Biden made his idiotic remark, a 22-year-old Virginia man did just that when two armed masked men leaned through the open window of his Virginia Beach home and warned him to close the bedroom door. After closing the door, the man grabbed a shotgun and fired several shots through his closed bedroom door, toward the window.

The two masked men have not been seen since, but for doing exactly what the vice president advised, the homeowner was arrested on charges of recklessly handling a firearm.

And as far as the cops saying they are being outgunned, they were not calling for a ban on assault rifles or complaining about crooks with such weapons, but instead were asking to be armed with AR-15s. Cops know that AR-style rifles are only used in fewer than one percent of all firearm-related criminal homicides (2011 FBI Uniform Crime Report).

I don’t know how many or what cops are coming to Biden and the Obama administration to complain about cops being outgunned, but it has been my experience that those who do are mostly police administrators doing so for political reasons, not for fear of such guns on the street.