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WATCH: Sheila Jackson Lee Gets Everything Wrong About AR-15s While Introducing Gun Control Bill

   DailyWire.com
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee speaks to members of the media outside the room where former White House communications director Hope Hicks testified at a closed-door interview with the House Judiciary Committee June 19, 2019 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Alex Wong/Getty Images

Last week, while telling reporters that Democrats need to “start “flooding” the Senate with gun-control bills, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) exposed her complete lack of knowledge on the issue:

“I’ve held an AR-15 in my hand, I wish I hadn’t,” Jackson Lee said. “It is as heavy as 10 boxes that you might be moving and the bullet that is utilized, a .50 caliber, these kinds of bullets, need to be licensed and do not need to be on the street.”

Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of guns knows that nothing she said was even close to being accurate. An AR-15 weighs less than a single filled moving box and uses .223 caliber bullets. There are some guns that can handle a .50 caliber bullet, but the AR-15 is not one of them.

Jason Howerton, one of the few journalists today who actually owns and knows anything about guns, laid into Jackson Lee on Twitter for her errors, which went unchecked by the mainstream media.

“For my non-gun peeps, claiming an AR-15 shoots .50 caliber bullets is as asinine as saying your car runs on orange juice,” Howerton tweeted. “Also, an AR-15 generally weighs somewhere between 7-9 pounds. So if 10 of your moving boxes weight 9 pounds, you’re really doing it wrong.”

Howerton followed up this tweet with a photo of the difference between the .223 rounds used in AR-15s and .50 caliber bullets.

The media and those advocating for gun control have a history of reporting demonstrably false information without consequence. Two years ago, left-wing media outlets went apoplectic over firearm suppressors because Hollywood refers to them as “silencers” and makes it seem as though people can fire weapons without anyone hearing. The Washington Post that year decried suppressors, claiming it would make it harder to hear gunshots in mass shooting situations. The science they referred to showed that suppressors drop the sound of an AR-15 from 165 decibels to 135 decibels. The Federalist’s Sean Davis noted at the time that the “federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration bans employers from exposing employees to 115 decibels for more than 15 minutes per day without providing them sound mitigation or hearing protection measures.”

For reference, a jackhammer clocks in at around 135 decibels. The Post also claimed in that same article that a .22LR semiautomatic rifle – which is used for shooting small game like squirrels – is “high-powered.”

In 2014, California State Sen. Kevin de Leon held a press conference announcing his latest gun-control bill. In less than a minute, de Leon claimed that a rifle he was holding was “a ghost gun” that “ has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.”

Howerton was there at that time to dispute de Leon’s ludicrous claims. A “ghost gun,” Howerton explained, are firearms that do not have serial numbers or are homemade. He went on to explain:

Firstly, there is no such thing as a “30-caliber clip” in the context of which he is speaking. He clearly is referring to a 30-round magazine. An ammunition magazine is different than a “clip,” but the two are often confused by those not familiar with guns. And though it’s obvious, there is also no such thing as a “30 magazine clip.”

Secondly, caliber refers the measurement of the width of a bullet or internal diameter of a gun barrel, not magazine capacity.

According to the Associated Press, the rifle on display in the video is indeed a homemade fully automatic rifle. Still, a rate of fire of 60 rounds per second — or 3,600 rounds per minute — is unlikely with a “homemade” rifle. Fully automatic weapons are also essentially banned already, even if they are homemade. The average rate of fire for a semi-automatic rifle is roughly 120 rounds per minute, depending on the shooter and reload time.

Let’s also not forget how many gun control activists use armed security guards.

The people who want to severely limit or abolish the Second Amendment don’t know the first thing about that which they hate so much.

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