Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire charged Monday that people who buy the wildly popular AR-15 semi-automatic rifle are buying it “to do bad things.”
“I think people need to have their voices heard, and what I’ve heard from people in New Hampshire is that they think there’s reasonable legislation that we can pass including things like looking at the types of weapons that are so easy for people to get,” the Democrat said on “Mitchell in the Morning,” BuzzFeed News reported.
“The fact is, the AR-15, the gun that [Orlando terrorist Omar] Mateen used, that’s a weapon of war,” Ms. Shaheen said.
Mateen actually used a Sig Sauer MCX semi-automatic rifle, similar to the AR-15, to gun down 49 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando June 12.
Politicians who don’t know the difference shouldn’t be allowed to make laws against them.
Ms. Shaheen claimed that what the AR-15 is “advertised as being able to do, technologically advances…killing people that previous weapons have been unable to do.”
“Somebody who is buying that kind of a weapon isn’t buying it for target shooting,” she said. “They’re not buying it to go out and hunt deer. You don’t need an AK-47 or an AR-15 to hunt deer. They’re buying it to do bad things and we need to recognize that and address it.”