OPINION - Editorial

Pesky machine guns

File this under those pesky facts, too

The current occupant of the Oval Office is often "fact-checked," as the press calls it. (See: The Washington Post). So imagine our surprise when fact-checking made the news again last week, but President Trump wasn't the one being corrected.

While speaking in Brazil toward the end of last month, Barack Obama was asked what his most difficult day in the office was. And he said the Sandy Hook shooting. We believe him. Having to comfort the parents of all those slain children broke the man's heart, and the whole thing was on display for the rest of the nation to see.

But then he continued. The former president spoke a little about our nation's gun laws, still clearly carrying some frustration that he could not convince Congress to pass any new gun control measures. And that's when he slipped: "Anybody can buy any weapon, any time whether or not you know, without much, if any, regulation. They can buy it over the Internet. They can buy machine guns."

Oops. The fine academics over at FactCheck.Org pointed out that it's fairly difficult to get one's hands on a machine gun. The law defines a machine gun as a fully automatic weapon--"that is, any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger."

Thanks to legislation like the 1934 National Firearms Act and 1986 Firearm Owners' Protection Act, getting a machine gun isn't like getting a hunting rifle. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, machine guns can only be transferred from one registered possessor to another if the weapon was lawfully registered and possessed before May 19, 1986. Then it's transferable with some different paperwork.

It may seem nitpicky to some of Mr. Obama's biggest fans, but you really can't just up and purchase a machine gun. Moral of the story: If you're going to talk about machine guns, it helps to know the laws before speaking.

Editorial on 06/08/2019

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