Best case scenario: Obama and Bloomberg prove they know nothing about the guns they seek to ban

Worst case scenario: They are intentionally lying, and hoping you don't know the difference

It has been widely reported that the killer in the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut last year was a semi-automatic AR-15 stolen from its rightful owner. In fact, it was for precisely that reason that President Obama said that gun control will be a "central issue" of his last four years in office.

But on Thursday, reports began circulating that at a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraiser in San Francisco on Wednesday, Obama claimed that the AR-15 used in the Connecticut crime was a fully-automatic firearm. At first, we wondered if the reports were accurate, or whether the president might have had a slip of the tongue.

The president was quoted as saying: "Now, over the next couple of months, we've got a couple of issues: gun control. I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don't have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon – by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly."

However, that is precisely what Obama said, as verified by the transcript of his speech, posted on the White House's website.

On top of Rep. Diana DeGette's (D-Colo.) claim the day before that once rounds are fired from a magazine, the magazine becomes inoperable, and similarly foolish statements by other anti-gun legislation sponsors, we are left wondering whether anyone at the core of the anti-gun campaign in Washington, D.C., knows which end of a gun is up.

© 2012 National Rifle Association of America. Institute for Legislative Action. This may be reproduced. It may not be reproduced for commercial purposes.

Additional Information:

by Chad D. Baus

Recently, CNN's Jake Tapper aired a news segment covering President Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recent claims that the Sandy Hook murderer used a fully-automatic rifle.

At the conclusion of his report, Tapper says that "it might help the advocates of gun control if, in their advocacy for stricter measures, they seemed more familiar with what exactly they are trying to ban."

While it may seem like Tapper is doing the gun rights community a favor by pointing out these "missteps," his history as an employee of Handgun Control Inc. (now Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence) suggests that he may be doing just what he said - trying to help his gun control buddies look less like idiots on the subject of an object they are trying to ban.

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman.