Maybe Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut has never heard of the shootings at Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Charleston, the Washington Navy Yard or Santa Fe High School, just to name a few. Or maybe Senator Murphy is just an ignorant gas bag whose only real goal is to disarm Americans, one type of gun at at time.
Sen. Chris Murphy wondered, for instance, why Americans needed “semi-automatic rifles,” at all. “Nobody needs an AR-15 to hunt,” the Connecticut senator tweeted. “Nobody needs a semi-automatic rifle to defend their home. But mass shooters NEED these weapons in order to murder as many people as efficiently as possible. And so nobody will miss them when they are illegal – except for the killers.”
One of the nice things about having individual rights codified in a Constitution is that Americans don’t (or shouldn’t) have to explain to government officials why they choose to practice them. I’m certain nothing in the Second Amendment mentions hunting, because the right of self-defense—an individual concern, as well as a collective one—wasn’t about shooting deer, it was about protecting Americans from the state.
While Murphy’s reductionist take is obviously wrong on several counts, it’s exceptionally wrong in claiming that killers would miss these rifles. Killers will always have weapons. And they don’t need AR-15s, even though there are probably between 10 and 15 million of them in circulation in the US. And unless Murphy believes federal agents should be tasked with going house to house and confiscating every “semi-automatic rifle”—an unlikely scenario—they will be with us a very long time.
– David Harsanyi in The Gun Control Campaign Against The AR-15 Is Full Of Lies
Nobody needs an AR-15 to hunt.
Nobody needs a semi-automatic rifle to defend their home.
But mass shooters NEED these weapons in order to murder as many people as efficiently as possible.
And so nobody will miss them when they are illegal – except for the killers.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) March 16, 2019