Opinion
By Jenn Jacques

In a Senate Judiciary Committee Oversight Hearing this week, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi faced questions regarding her leadership of the Justice Department.

But at the hearing, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) used her time questioning the nation’s top law enforcement official to repeat her canned comment about her ‘Uncle Dick’s deer stand’ when reiterating her support for legislation that would infringe upon citizens’ Second Amendment rights by banning popularly-owned firearms.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.

Illogical Reasoning, Rinsed and Repeated

Opening her time on the microphone, Sen. Klobuchar set the scene for an attack on our right to keep and bear arms. Addressing AG Bondi, Sen. Klobuchar got to her point.

“In 2018, after the Parkland shooting, you were attorney general and there was a bill called the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act and the bill banned bump stocks and enacted red flag laws and raised the minimum age to purchase a firearm in Florida from 18 to 21 and you actually defended the law in court from a challenge from the NRA and we know that I’m in favor of an assault weapon ban. Period,” she said.

“I look at these bills, and I think ‘Does this hurt my Uncle Dick and the deer stand?’ – we have a proud tradition of hunting in Minnesota – I don’t think they do,” Sen. Klobuchar suggested.

Sen. Klobuchar has referenced her Uncle Dick numerous times when discussing her belief that Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) can and should be banned.

Since she brought it up, though, NSSF views gun control bills through the lens and with the knowledge that our Founding Fathers didn’t add the Second Amendment to the Constitution in response to a rogue deer herd. They added it as a guarantee that law-abiding Americans had the Constitutional right and means to keep and bear arms to keep a new government in check.

Mislabels and Misinformation

Another key point to address is the term ‘assault rifle,’ which has been attributed to Adolf Hitler after he referred to the MP 43 (Maschinenpistole) by the German word Sturmgewehr – “assault rifle” in English. That the firearm, which became known as the Sturmgewehr 44, features an intermediate cartridge, controllable automatic fire, and a higher rate of fire, is not an accurate comparison to the MSRs of today.

Here in the United States, the term ‘assault weapon’ didn’t even exist in the lexicon of firearms before 1989. In 1988, anti-gun activist Josh Sugarmann, who was the communications director for the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, recommended that gun-control groups use public ignorance and fear to ban everything they can stuff into the phrase “assault weapon.”

Sugarman wrote, “Assault weapons … are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons…. Efforts to restrict assault weapons are more likely to succeed than those to restrict handguns.”

In the past several years, though, Americans have purchased Modern Sporting Rifles (MSRs) by the millions and are becoming more aware of the firearm’s functionality and operation. They aren’t buying the lies repeated by gun control groups and their elected allies who seek to ban the popular firearm.

In fact, firearm industry data has shown over the past few years while law-abiding Americans purchased firearms at a blistering pace, the MSR was a popular choice, including among first-time gun owners. Since 1990, there are more than 30 million MSRs in circulation today. That includes more than 4.5 million in the last three years alone. That makes the MSR more popular and commonly-owned today than there are Ford F-150 pickup trucks on the road.

I wonder if Uncle Dick drives an F-150?

The Cold Hard Truth

Unfortunately for Sen. Klobuchar and her gun control allies, America has already experimented with a ban, and facts overwhelmingly prove the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban did not reduce crime.

“These are just incredibly popular firearms… they are commonly owned, commonly used,” said political economist and assistant professor William English of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “At the end of the day, it is a rifle that I think is very easy to shoot, it’s very easy to control, not a lot of recoil.”

“So, it’s a good gun,” English added, when speaking with Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard. “And to see it become widely owned, I suppose, makes sense in that context.”

Clearly, We the People agree. Sen. Klobuchar should take note.

About The National Shooting Sports Foundation

NSSF is the trade association for the firearm industry. Its mission is to promote, protect and preserve hunting and shooting sports. Formed in 1961, NSSF has a membership of thousands of manufacturers, distributors, firearm retailers, shooting ranges, sportsmen’s organizations, and publishers nationwide. For more information, visit nssf.org

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