Congresswoman Diane DeGette just doesn’t understand. In response to a question about high capacity magazines, Rep. Degette said “I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available.”
Anyone who knows anything about magazines knows that they can be reloaded over and over again. Earlier in the meeting Rep. Degette tells the audience that she is the prime co-sponsor of a bill in Congress to ban high capacity magazines. Given her level of ignorance regarding the devices, it’s hard to imagine how she ended up in such a position.
Later, as an explanation for the ridiculous comments by Rep. Degette, her spokeswoman, Juliet Johnson used the go-to explanation for any form of Congressional stupidity, saying, “she simply misspoke.” Her entire statement:
“The Congresswoman has been working on a high-capacity assault magazine ban for years, and has been deeply involved in the issue; she simply misspoke in referring to ‘magazines’ when she should have referred to ‘clips,’ which cannot be reused because they don’t have a feeding mechanism. Quite frankly, this is just another example of opponents of common-sense gun violence prevention trying to manipulate the facts to distract from the critical issue of keeping our children safe and keeping killing machines out of the hands of disturbed individuals. It’s more political gamesmanship that stands in the way of responsible solutions.”
We have left plenty of the video in this clip for you to be able to make up your mind about whether or not Rep. DeGette “misspoke,” but from our viewpoint, she was addressing the question with the best knowledge she had—unfortunately that wasn’t very much at all.
