This is not a column about gun control. It is about the people trying to pass gun control laws who know virtually nothing about guns or their use. If you’re going to try to control something, you should at least have some idea of what it is you are controlling and how it works.
Almost daily we see in the news where someone who appears oblivious to which end the bullet comes out of pontificating about guns and trying to pass gun control legislation. At the top of that list is President Joe Biden, whose own words prove his complete ignorance of the subject.
Biden has previously suggested that a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun is an ideal defensive weapon for a woman, obviously totally unaware that the kick from the first shot would knock the average inexperienced woman onto her backside, rendering her completely defenseless.
Biden recently compared buying a 9mm today to buying a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed. He also went on to state that “the Second Amendment was never absolute” and pontificated that a 9mm bullet is a “high-caliber weapon,” so powerful that it “blows the lung out of the body.”
Well Joe, the courts have ruled that the Second Amendment is pretty much absolute, but even so, your statements about ammunition are ridiculous. Actually, a standard 9mm bullet is the same size as a .38 and lies somewhere in the middle of muzzle velocity, a gauge of a round’s striking power. It is good for personal combat situations because it will stop a target but probably will not penetrate like the much more powerful .357 Magnum and above.
During most of my years with the Lima Police Department, we carried .357 Magnum revolvers, but we fired only .38-caliber ammunition. The .357 had the potential, in an urban setting, to penetrate the body you were aiming at and kill someone else some distance away. That is not likely with either the .38 or the 9mm.
The 9mm has become pretty much the standard for law enforcement worldwide, including the LPD, and for personal defense. It fits the higher ammunition capacity weapons needed badly in self-defense. You don’t have to reload it after six rounds like a revolver. It is powerful enough to stop the target but without the overkill of some larger calibers. It also would not “blow the lung out of” even a small dog, let alone a human.
Biden went on to tout the attributes of .22-caliber ammunition, which in self-defense situations is frequently about as effective as a slingshot. That’s not to say that it can’t kill, but unless the shot is perfectly placed, it frequently will not even stop an assailant. My own experience is that with a .22, only perfectly placed rounds were killing groundhogs that were destroying a deck, and I had to switch to a larger weapon.
Biden’s most ridiculous statement to date is, “It makes no sense to be able to purchase something that can fire up to 300 rounds.” He went on, “There’s only one reason for something that can fire, you know, 100 shots.”
No weapon exists that “holds” that much. Even a military machine gun only “holds” one round at a time. It passes through the weapon attached to a heavy separate belt. Biden and Dems in Congress want to limit us to 10-round magazines, a devious move designed to eliminate a majority of handgun magazines in use for personal carry by the general public today.
It is hypocritical that people in power in Washington are willing to continue to try to influence gun and ammunition ownership and use, when they obviously know little about the subject but just enough to convince the gullible that their motives are good, when that is an obvious lie.
It also is pure hypocrisy that a man who has been protected for much of his life by people armed with much more firepower than you and I can even own wants to limit our ability to defend ourselves against lawbreakers. I wonder if he’s willing to also limit the hundreds of people in his extensive protection detail to 10 small-caliber rounds each.
