"The kind of gun being carried he shouldn't be carrying."

During a question and answer session on NBC’s “Today” show, former vice president and rumored presidential 2020 contender Joe Biden said the hero who stopped the Texas church shooter earlier this month should not have been allowed to carry an AR-15.

“With the tragedy that just happened in Texas, how do you justify the Democratic view on gun control when the shooter was stopped by a man who was legally licensed to carry a gun?” a young woman in the audience asked Biden.

Joe Biden says that the man who stopped the Texas church shooter should not have been armed. pic.twitter.com/pY3hBHPHuX — Ryan Saavedra 🇺🇸 (@RealSaavedra) November 14, 2017

“Well first of all, the kind of gun being carried he shouldn’t be carrying,” Biden said. “I wrote the last serious gun control law . . and it outlawed assault weapons and outlawed weapons with magazines that held a whole lotta bullets so you could kill a lot of people a whole lot more quickly.”

“Assault weapon” is a nonsense term not usable in legislation, since it could apply to any object used to attack another person. An assault rifle generally means a select-fire or automatic rifle with an intermediate cartridge designed for military use. The AR-15 is not an assault rifle, most clearly because it is semiautomatic. Civilians are already banned from owning automatic weapons.

The Texas man who stopped the shooter from killing more people used an AR-15 to confront the alleged murderer, who wore a ballistic vest and was armed with tactical gear and a rifle of equal firepower.

“If I had run out of the house with a pistol and faced a bulletproof vest and kevlar and helmets, it might have been futile,” Stephen Willeford told CRTV in an interview last week. “I ran out with an AR-15 and that’s what he was shooting the place up with.”

Biden apparently doesn’t think guns are useful for self-defense and protecting others, even though police and soldiers can’t stop bad guys without guns, and neither can private citizens. Public records are replete with instances of private citizens enjoying protection against evil when armed.

“It’s just rational to say certain people shouldn’t have guns,” Biden insisted, however. “The fact that some people with guns are legally able to acquire a gun and they turn out to be crazy after the fact, that’s life. There’s nothing you can do about that, but we can save a lot of lives and we’ve stopped tens of thousands of people from getting guns who shouldn’t have guns.”