AP Photo/Michael Sohn

Last week, former (former…former…former…I just can’t say that enough) President Barack Obama was doing something or another in Brazil that we hope did not involve wearing a Speedo and participated in a “town hall” discussion. He was asked about the most difficult moment of his presidency and he said the sacking of the US Consulate in Benghazi. Kidding. He said it was the Sandy Hook school shooting. Fair enough. But what followed next was an series of lies that would have made Goebbels blush.

“Some of you may be aware that our gun laws in the United States don’t make much sense. Anybody can buy any weapon, any time without much, if any, regulation. They buy it over the internet. They can buy machine guns.”

There is literally not a single truth in this sentence.

Anyone can’t buy any weapon. There are age restrictions, restrictions based on penal servitude and mental capacity and residency. There are restrictions on what weapons can be sold. You can’t buy a weapon over the internet without dealing with a vendor who had a federal firearms license. It is possible to buy a machinegun but very difficult and very expensive. Obama strings it in with other weapons and makes it seem like you can walk into the 7-11 at midnight, drunk, and walk out with an M-240B.

PolitiFact, the leftwing advocacy organization that tries to pretend it fact checks statements, got involved once Obama started getting a lot of flak from the right on this nonsense. They dutifully find, as I stated above that none of it is true at least in the context of the US having lax or non-existent gun laws.

Obama said that in the United States, “anybody can buy any weapon, any time without much, if any, regulation. They buy it over the internet. They can buy machine guns.” The assertion that anybody can buy a weapon flies in the face of the many types of people, from felons to drug abusers to spouse abusers, who may not buy weapons. Internet sales are legal, as he said, and they take place under the same rules that govern other gun sales. As for machine guns, they are strictly illegal, with the exception under legal controls of models from 1986 and earlier.

How do they rate it?

WTF? I mean, WTFingF? There is nothing in that statement that is true in the context of the point that Obama was trying to make. It was simply a baldfaced lie of epic proportions. So why did they hedge it? And why did they give Trump a “Pants on Fire” rating for his opinion that the Obama White House didn’t act on Russian meddling in the 2016 electins (see Politifact Demonstrates Why It Is Incapable Of Separating Fact From Fiction)?

Because PolitiFact doesn’t care about truth or fiction or journalism. PolitiFact exists to protect Democrats and to damage Republicans. Much like most of the other alleged fact checkers plying their grift.

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