Barack Obama was in Brazil last month, pontificating about American gun laws.
Former President Barack Obama has been accused of “outright lying” about guns in the United States during remarks at an event in Sao Paulo, Brazil last month, and even PolitiFact has declared his claims to have been “mostly false.”
Obama, whose presidency brought America the Operation Fast and Furious gun running scandal, told a large audience, “Gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon, anytime without, you know, without much if any regulation. They can buy over the Internet. They can buy machine guns.”
According to people now criticizing the former-president’s remarks, that’s about as bald-faced a lie as anyone could ever mutter.
Writing at National Review, Charles C.W. Cooke accused Obama of being “misleading” in his comments. Over at P.J. Media, nationally-syndicated talk host Dennis Prager asserted that Obama “fabricated a series of falsehoods” and further complained that the silence of the American news media about these canards speaks to the media’s lack of character.
The fact that gun prohibitionists frequently mouth the same dishonest rhetoric and are rarely challenged by reporters is the primary reason why so many in the firearms community consider “mainstream” journalists to be untrustworthy and their reportage to be unreliable if not totally false.
Obama excels at being glib and his hipster persona appeals to the far left. He’s just out of his league when it comes to firearms facts. Indeed, where guns in America are concerned, Obama is something of a prevaricator. But, he gets away with it because the media fawns over him.
Asserting that anyone can buy any firearm anytime they want “without, you know, much of any regulation” may apply to the streets of Chicago’s South Side, where Obama got his political start as a “community organizer,” but is demonstrably false where law-abiding American gun owners are concerned. Honest citizens are faced with background checks, waiting periods in many jurisdictions, restrictions on where they may carry a firearm if they obtain a license or permit (which requires a separate background check), storage requirements in some jurisdictions and more.
One doesn’t simply buy a machine gun, as Obama suggested. That’s a lengthy process and it isn’t allowed in some states. Machine gun ownership requires massive paperwork, as noted in the National Review.
The only remark Obama made with which gun owners can agree is that “Gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense.” On that level, Obama could easily become drinking buddies with Alan Gottlieb and Wayne LaPierre.
And now, in Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam is proposing a lot more gun laws in reaction to the Virginia Beach shooting last week. Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, had something to say about that in USA Today.
“No law on the books now, or that has been proposed, would have prevented the Virginia Beach tragedy,” Gottlieb said. “But the predictable knee-jerk reflex of the gun control crowd is to seek tighter restrictions on millions of people who harmed nobody, just to advance their agenda of public disarmament. That’s not justice, it’s social bigotry suggested by people who would never tolerate a similar broad brush policy were it aimed at the rights of any other group.”
In an earlier statement about the Virginia Beach tragedy, Gottlieb reminded the anti-gun-rights governor that, “The killer in Virginia Beach had already passed multiple background checks, including an enhanced check to legally purchase a suppressor. The incident didn’t involve a so-called ‘assault weapon,’ but two handguns. There was no indication that the gunman was an extreme risk to anybody, and this awful event didn’t involve a child gaining access to any firearm.
“So tell us, Ralph,” he continued, “just what part of your extremist gun control wish list do you think would have prevented what happened in Virginia Beach?”
That’s no doubt a question that Gottlieb or someone else may have to throw at Obama, if the ex-president continues to pontificate about American gun laws. If Obama stays true to form, without his teleprompter he’ll ramble, stutter, dance and weave until he can utter something that he hopes will sound clever, but won’t have the substance of a donut hole.
