Democrats in Virginia are trying to take away your guns, yet their public statements make it clear they know next to nothing about firearms or the Second Amendment.
Case in point: Virginia Delegate Mark Levine, who represents areas of liberal Northern Virginia, spoke at a town hall on Saturday and when asked to define “assault weapon,” launched into a six-minute speech that provided nothing but misinformation. He begins by reiterating the Democrat talking point that the 1994 “assault weapons” ban reduced gun crimes. It didn’t by any real margin, as the guns banned weren’t typically used in gun crimes to begin with. The Department of Justice produced two studies on the ban to measure its effectiveness and concluded in both that it had little to no effect.
Levine then mimics someone holding a “rifle” used for hunting and claims mass shooters don’t want to use weapons like that because “someone could hit the rifle butt against their head – deer don’t do this, elk don’t do this, but humans trying to save their lives do this.”
He then mimicked what he claimed mass shooters like to use. His body language suggested he was using a fully automatic weapon (he twisted at the hips like he was in some old gangster movie). Fully automatic weapons are not used in mass shootings because they’ve been banned since 1986. Democrats and their media allies like to claim “semi-automatic” is virtually the same as fully automatic, but they’re not. A fully automatic weapon means it reloads and fires repeatedly with one trigger pull. Semi-automatic weapons fire one round per trigger pull.
Next, Levine claims the Dayton, Ohio, shooter was able to shoot “some 75 rounds in less than 30 seconds, shooting 40-odd people while the police were right there.” The gunman actually fired 41 rounds in that time frame (shooting 75 rounds in less than 30 seconds is impossible for a semi-automatic weapon). Even still, the gunmen was only able to shoot that many because he illegally modified his weapon (meaning he didn’t care about gun laws to begin with).
Levine continues on this way, getting every single point about guns wrong and trying to suggest that a “pistol grip” is a feature of “weapons of war.” The bill he sponsored, which seeks to ban “assault firearms,” which he defines in a number of vague, useless, and incorrect ways, actually tries to suggest that a “bayonet mount” and a weapon weighing “50 ounces or more when the pistol is unloaded” are also examples of “weapons of war” features.
Stephen Gutowski, a reporter for The Washington Free Beacon and one of the few reporters who actually knows about firearms, took Levine to task on Twitter for his disinformation screed.
“Delegate Mark Levine (D) just delivered the most utterly uninformed speech on firearms I’ve ever seen in my life. How can you be so misinformed on what you’re proposing imprisoning Virginians’ over, @DelegateMark? You don’t even have a basic understanding of what you want to ban,” Gutowski tweeted.
“Delegate Levine (D) is sponsoring HB 961 which would ban the new sales of many kinds of firearms (including AR-15s) and require those already owned to be registered. It would also confiscate millions of magazines which Levine severely misunderstands,” he added.
Watch Levine’s full answer below: