Supposed lawmaker Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin proudly displayed his know-nothingness Monday in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on the issue of the Orlando massacre and guns. Ideology, he said, was what killed those 49 people—not the shooter's AR-15 assault weapon. He told Blitzer that "fully automatic weapons are already banned and that the U.S. should not further restrict the constitutional right to bear arms as a result of Sunday’s attack at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub."
That confused Blitzer, since the AR-15 the shooter used was a legal semi-automatic weapon. "You're differentiating between that and a fully automatic assault weapon?" Blitzer asked Johson. "Because that weapon certainly did kill a lot of people." Here comes the Johnson brilliance:
"So do bombs," Johnson replied. "So there are other ways that terrorists can slaughter people. It's their ideology. Their ideology calls for the slaughter of innocents. That's the root cause. It's not law-abiding gun owners that are the problem here, it's Islamic terrorists."
"Their ideology," huh? Presumably, he meant the ideology of homophobes born in New York, like Omar Mateen? And about those bombs, no—bombs aren't killing hundreds of Americans every year. Because the government regulates bomb-making material, so it's awfully hard to get and much harder to use to kill masses of people. Because yeah, bombs kill people. But not nearly as many people as guns do.
Johnson doesn't even have enough curiosity about his job as a lawmaker to find out what our laws actually are. He doesn't have enough commitment to doing this job to explore issues any further than the NRA talking points he undoubtedly regularly receives. Johnson does not belong in the U.S. Senate. Help Russ Feingold retire him.
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