Earlier this month, Second Amendment activist Colion Noir broke down a 2012 interview with Mike Bloomberg. In it, the presidential hopeful offered his thoughts on gun ownership.
They aren’t good.
When asked how he would define the term “assault weapon,” Bloomberg replied, “Well, if it can fire a lot of bullets very quickly, then that’s a good place to start.”
Such a definition would cover all semiautomatic firearms, including the overwhelming majority of handguns. Bloomberg appeared not to be aware of this: when it was pointed out to him, he responded, “No, but pistols are different.” The Democrat made a gun gesture with his hand as he stated this.
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Why he would focus on semiautomatic rifles isn’t entirely clear. Of the over fifteen thousand murders committed in 2017, the FBI reports that only 403 involved rifles of any kind. By comparison, CDC figures show that in the same year, 624 children nine years of age and under drowned. Despite this, Bloomberg isn’t pushing to ban hot tubs, pools, or plastic buckets.
The former New York City mayor then went on to conflate semi-automatic rifles with automatic ones, explaining, “An assault weapon, you basically hold [the trigger] and it goes boom-boom-boom.”
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In fact, fully automatic firearms are already heavily regulated. Under federal law, owners must be fingerprinted, pay a $200 tax, and register their their weapons with the ATF. What’s more, the sale of new full-autos was banned in 1986.
Bloomberg also argued for a three round magazine limit, complaining, “If you haven’t hit the deer with three shots, you’re a pretty lousy shot.” That many people own guns to protect their lives seems not to have occurred to him.
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A three round limit would have prevented a Milwaukee man from defending himself when a gang attacked his store. A Detroit business owner would also have been at a disadvantage when several robbers threatened his life. And this Houston resident likely wouldn’t have survived when a car-load of criminals came after him:
When self-defense was mentioned to Bloomberg, he dismissed the concept entirely, advising people, “Don’t try to go for a gun. If you’ve got somebody pointing a gun at you, do you think you’re going be able to out shoot them? That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard.”
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The idea didn’t seem stupid to Jack Wilson; in December, Wilson used his gun to stop a mass shooting at his church. Nor did it seem stupid to the thousands of Americans who successfully use their weapons to defend themselves and others.
What’s more, the presence of a gun creates a deterrent. In a survey of convicts funded by the Department of Justice, 81 percent agreed, “A smart criminal always tries to find out if his potential victim is armed.” Seventy four percent concurred that, “One reason burglars avoid houses when people are home is they fear being shot.”
Bloomberg cited a study that found a gun in the home was twenty-two times more likely to be used on an occupant than to shoot an intruder. However, it had a number of shortcomings, with one being that the researchers made no distinction between legally owned guns and those held by people who are legally prohibited from having them, specifically felons, drug addicts, and people with misdemeanor domestic violence convictions.
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And as Dr. John Lott pointed out in his book, More Guns, Less Crime, the comparison is flawed because a gun doesn’t always need to be fired for it be effective; simply pointing a firearm is often enough to scare off an intruder. “Counting only the deaths from defensive gun use also ignores the much larger number of effective defensive gun uses that don’t require that the gun be fired,” Lott wrote.
Noir notes in the video that Bloomberg has spent millions of dollars trying to control guns and yet he seems completely ignorant them about them. It’s not clear whether the billionaire leftist really is this clueless or if he’s deliberately trying to mislead voters. But either way, one thing is clear.
He’s a threat to our rights.
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