Vice President Joe Biden is quickly becoming a punch line for his ill-advised suggestions about home defense with a shotgun, and now he’s demonstrated a new area of false expertise: Hunting.
His shotgun-obsessive comments of late have people in and out of the firearms community wondering just how far Biden will be able to insert his foot into his mouth.
In a remark to Field & Stream magazine, the vice president observed, “If you can’t get the bear or the deer in four or five shots, you’ve got a problem.”
Experienced western big game hunters could easily observe that if you think you might need four or five shots to clobber a deer or bear, the problem you have is lousy marksmanship and, as the late Robert Ruark might put it, “not enough gun.”
Biden made headlines several days ago when he admitted telling his wife that if she ever had a problem at home, she should grab the double-barrel shotgun, go outside and touch off a couple of rounds on the balcony. As this column noted, that could be anywhere from a misdemeanor to a felony, depending upon the jurisdiction, but it probably would not reach the threshold of an act of self-defense.
In the Field & Stream interview, the vice president claims to have told a man during an internet town hall session, “Well, you know, my shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15, because you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door.”
Once again, Biden is recommending a course of action that could lead straight to a legal nightmare, and a nasty home repair bill. Firing indiscriminately through a door – being unable to see what is on the other side – is a horribly foolish act, the kind of thing that lands people in prison.
In his response to a question about magazine capacity limits, Biden’s answer – considering Wednesday’s release of a now-viral video discussed by this column – is demonstrably untrue, and mixes the proverbial apples and oranges:
“If in fact the only thing available was 10 rounds in the AR-15 used by the guy who butchered those children up in Sandy Hook, he would have had to change that magazine three more times. And in that time frame, the police would have been there sooner, saving the lives of one or two or three children who got shot.”
Until police can magically “beam” to the scene of a crime as they would in a Star Trek episode, their response time will not beat or even tie with the speed of a magazine change.
There was one other thing he mentioned in the interview that may go right over the heads of the White House press corps, and it had to do with school security. Recall how the administration reacted when Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association recommended putting armed police in every school in the nation, in response to the Sandy Hook tragedy?
Biden told Field & Stream about the Obama administration’s plan: “What we’re proposing is 1,000 new school resource officers to show best practices that we help. Just like in the COPS bill, where if a community applies, if a mayor or governor applies for more cops and they meet the need, the federal government will come up with X percent of the cost of that salary for the cop for the next five years. The same way, it would work the same way.”
Biden leaves some weasel room (that’s not a typo) for school administrators to hire a school psychologist rather than a security officer. Evidently, he thinks someone will be able to talk down a mass killer by psychoanalyzing him during a magazine change.
This revelation once again shows the dual standard of the mainstream press. If the NRA advocates something, it’s stupid. If the Obama administration suggests essentially the same thing, it’s genius.
Well, it’s considerably smarter than shooting through doors.
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