Mitt Romney may need to brush up on how he handles the topic of gun control, because what he said in an interview today with Brian Williams made no sense. Asked whether he could “see the argument” of people who question whether citizens should be allowed to buy AR-15 assault rifles or purchase 6,000 rounds of ammunition online, Romney responded:

ROMNEY: “Well this person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them. And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t. Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential, to improve the lots of the American people.”

Let’s break this down, piece by piece:

“Well this person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them.”

We don’t yet know what chemicals Holmes used to make his booby traps or how he acquired them. But the weapons he used — including a semiautomatic assault rifle with a 100-round magazine — to actually shoot dozens of people were all purchased legally. That’s, uh, why he had them.

“And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t.”

Literally nobody believes that stricter gun-control laws would “make all bad things go away.” The point is to save lives by making it more difficult to kill people. Romney knows this — after all, he signed an assault-weapon ban into law as governor of Massachusetts.