‘Maria, if I Take a Pencil and Stick It in Your Neck, That’s an Assault Weapon’
Former Arkansas Republican Governor Mike Huckabee defended the NRA and its members Sunday morning, insisting that no NRA member has ever been a mass shooter (that’s never been proven – the NRA does not reveal its membership list) and going so far as to scoff at the term “assault weapon,” saying that even a pencil could be an assault weapon. And he went so far as to inject immigration into the discussion.
Huckabee displayed his vast ignorance of gun violence, wholly ignoring the fact that merely having a gun in the house greatly increases the possibility of gun violence and even death. He railed against those who wish to restrict the rights of gun owners, whom he described as “law abiding legal citizens who own firearms who have never committed a crime who have really no inclination to commit a crime, no predilection to commit a crime.”
(It’s unclear why Huckabee chose to mention the status of a person’s immigration, or why undocumented immigrants should enter the conversation.)
“Are we going to restrict them, or are we going to go after the people that we need to be worried about? People who have mental illness, people who have made threats?”
Huckabee also falsely claimed that the “old laws haven’t yet changed the course of human behavior.”
In reality, when the ban on semi-automatic weapons expired in 2004 and Republicans in Congress refused to renew it, gun deaths from those weapons spiked, as did mass shootings.
The ordained Baptist minister and twice-failed presidential candidate tried to blame gun violence on movies, ignoring that other countries have the same movies we do and no where near the same level of gun violence – because they have no where near the same number of guns.
“There’s also a lot of misinformation about what an AR-15 is,” Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo interjected, claiming that “because one gun looks scary, people claim that it is military style.”
Huckabee agreed, saying “an AR-15 is really a matter of function – it has nothing to do with its lethality,” which is effectively false. People may substitute the term AR-15 for the broader classification of semi-automatic more lethal than basic handguns or long guns.
“People call it an ‘assault weapon,'” Huckabee, frustrated, concluded. “Maria, if I take a pencil and stick it in your neck, that’s an assault weapon.”