Can You Count How Many Gun Lies Obama Told in Just 5 Seconds While Talking to This Foreign Crowd?
Barack Obama may be mercifully out of office, but it looks like he has found a pastime in retirement: Lying to foreign nations about the United States and its laws.
During a recent visit to Brazil, the former president took the stage and began rattling off anti-gun rhetoric.
It’s no secret that Obama and most liberals are against gun ownership, but the 44th president might have set a new record for telling the most anti-gun lies in a matter of seconds.
“The most difficult day that I’ve had was the day that there was a shooting in a school where 20 small children were shot,” Obama said Thursday while appearing at a conference called VTEX DAY in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
His statement started off fine — school shootings are a serious concern — but then veered away from any truthful reality.
“Some of you may be aware, our gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense,” the ex-president said. “Anybody can buy any weapon, any time without much, if any, regulation. They can buy it over the internet. They can buy machine guns.”
Obama tells Brazil crowd: “Some of you may be aware our gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon any time — without much if any regulation, they can buy it over the Internet, they can buy machine guns.” pic.twitter.com/MFFTgaFwLS
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) May 31, 2019
If Obama were Pinocchio, his nose would have grown so long it would have hit Argentina. Every specific statement he uttered about U.S. gun laws was not just wrong, but a wild lie.
“Anybody can buy a weapon, any time.” Even the most anti-gun liberal knows that this just isn’t true. Not “anybody” can buy a weapon. Laws at both the federal and state levels limit who is qualified to purchase and possess firearms, and that’s before even discussing concealed carry.
At a bare minimum, purchasers must be at least 18 years old to buy any firearm and 21 to buy a handgun. Every person who buys a gun from a licensed dealer must pass a federal background check, which confirms that they aren’t disqualified.
And there are many ways that a person can be disqualified from buying a gun. The NRA-ILA has a good summary. Among others, felons, drug addicts, dishonorably-discharged veterans and anybody under a restraining order cannot legally buy a gun.
When someone breaks the law and obtains a firearm anyway, he or she faces serious penalties including jail time. And those are just the federal regulations. Each state has its own additional laws covering guns as well.
Take Obama’s home state of Illinois, for example. Illinois “requires that any person obtain a ten-year license [a Firearm Owner’s Identification, or FOID, card] to purchase or possess firearms and ammunition,” according to the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence.
“The licensing process requires a detailed background check on the prospective FOID cardholder,” ICAHV wrote. The state “imposes waiting periods between the purchase and actual transfer of a firearm to a purchaser – 24 hours for long guns and 72 hours for handguns.”
So much for “anybody, any time.”
How about Obama’s next statements about buying guns on the internet and buying machine guns? More Pinocchio.
“[N]o one can just order guns off the Internet without going through a background check. Far from it,” The Federalist wrote. “Internet gun purchases are relatively rare, but when they happen, the purchased items aren’t sent directly to the buyer but first must be sent to a dealer holding a federal firearms license.”
“Such gun transactions processed by a federal firearms license holder must include a background check, regardless of whether the sale is across state lines or not. Gun transactions across state lines must be processed in the home state of the recipient. So if you purchase a gun off the Internet from a different state, it will be sent to a federal firearms license holder in your state, and you would not be allowed to take possession of it until a background check is done on you,” The Federalist noted.
How about machine guns? Don’t get us started. Basically, ownership of fully automatic weapons is rare, and there are a slew of extra requirements and a federal licensing process — yes, more background checks — that must be completed before anybody can even consider this.
Meanwhile, Brazil — which has strict gun-control laws — has a murder rate that is out of control. Obama conveniently left that part out while bashing America.
Here’s the thing: Barack Obama wasn’t just president for eight years. He was a U.S. Senator, a state senator and a lawyer. You’d think that somehow, he’d grasp the basics of American firearms legalities.
Either he’s shockingly ignorant about how our laws actually work, or he purposely told blatant lies to foreigners in order to push an agenda. You can decide which one is more likely.
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