Kamala: AR-15s Not 'Suitable' for Hunting. ATF: Not So Fast
Like most of her other Democratic cohorts running for president in 2020, California Sen. Kamala Harris has enthusiastically joined in the race toward the far left, particularly on the issue of strict gun control and the Second Amendment.
Harris has already stated that, should she be elected president of the United States, she would grant Congress 100 days to take legislative action on gun control before she would resort to unilaterally using executive actions to impose a variety of restrictions on firearms and gun ownership.
Politico reported that Harris revealed on Wednesday what one of those executive orders would be — a complete ban on the importation of AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles, which she referred to as “assault weapons.”
The ban would be in place until the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives could reach a determination as to whether such weapons were suitable for civilian ownership or not.
“When we look at the issue of assault weapons, let’s be very clear: Assault weapons are designed to kill a lot of people in a very short period time,” Harris said in Nashua, New Hampshire, according to Politico.
She followed that debatable assertion with an entirely unintelligible word salad that revealed her utter lack of knowledge about firearms and gun violence in general.
“We cannot any longer afford to allow people to make this a partisan issue,” she said.
“Those guns, those assault weapons, do not discriminate and determine, ‘OK, is the person pointing it at a Democrat or a Republican.’ This can no longer be a partisan issue,” she said.
As to her proposed ban on the importation of so-called “assault weapons” or “weapons of war,” Harris’ campaign defended that likely unconstitutional proposal by asserting that semi-automatic firearms like the AR-15 or AK-47 weren’t “suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes” such as competitive target shooting or hunting.
But Harris is absolutely incorrect in that assertion, as was determined by none other than a top-ranking official with the very ATF that she would task with making such a determination in the event she became president.
Indeed, the ATF produced a white paper in January 2017 to inform the incoming administration of President Donald Trump of agency regulations worthy of review to either reduce or modify them.
That paper was written by ATF Associate Deputy Director/Chief Operating Officer Ronald Turk.
Turk made it clear in the executive summary of the paper that everything contained therein was intended for discussion and was not to be construed as official policy or agency guidelines.
Nevertheless, the paper made it clear where the agency’s leadership stood on a number of issues, and when it comes to the “sporting purposes” of firearms like the AR-15, Harris and the ATF couldn’t be further apart.
Section 6 of the paper called for a new and revised study on what constitutes “sporting purpose” in terms of imported firearms, and Turk noted immediately that “modern sporting rifles” like the AR-15 and AK-variants “has increased exponentially in sport shooting. These firearm types are now standard for hunting activities.”
After calling for the agency to update its standards with the current “sport shooting landscape of today,” Turk pointed out: “Restriction on imports serves questionable public safety interests, as these rifles are already generally legally available for manufacture and ownership in the United States.”
In other words, semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 and AK-variants have been determined by the ATF to be suitable for both sport shooting and hunting, a complete contradiction of Harris’ ignorant claim.
Harris has once again shown that she is ignorant of the state of modern weaponry and the firearms industry, and has no idea what she is talking about when it comes to the standard practices and common use of what she mistakenly calls “assault weapons.”
Either that or she is purposely lying about the commonly accepted “sporting purposes” of modern semi-automatic rifles to promote her anti-Second Amendment agenda.
Neither is a particularly good look for an American politician these days, especially one who wants to rule over the country and impose her whims on the law-abiding armed citizenry.
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