As I highlighted on Friday, anti-gunners don’t seem actually to know anything about guns. Their ignorance is obvious to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of firearms, but that doesn’t seem to matter. After all, they don’t need to know how to tell a Colt from a Daniel Defense weapon to know they’re all deadly, or so they might say.

However, the problem is that ignorance can lead to bad law. Take this as an example.

“It is clear that we must crack down on deadly, military-style assault rifles, which is why I voted to pass Senate Bill 1657, which holds gun dealers accountable by ensuring dangerous criminals and those with a history of mental illness or domestic violence cannot get their hands on a weapon,” Illinois State Representative Fred Crespo claimed in a letter to constituents. “I also support House Bill 1469, which would prohibit the sale and possession of high capacity magazines which turn regular firearms into fully automatic weapons” [emphasis in original]. //bearingarms.com/wp-content/themes/Bearing-Arms-2016/images/ba_placeholder.png fords.org/background-checks-in-illinois/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the feds and the state, and “prohibited persons” are called that for a reason. If citizen disarmament edicts really meant such people “cannot get their hands on a weapon,” we’d expect to see results vastly different from reality, not that the political trough-feeders don’t use still unacceptable reductions as an excuse to brag about what a bang-up job they’re doing. Second, really? Magazines can convert a gun to full-auto? This is one of the guys responsible for crafting “commonsense gun laws”? At first I had to make sure the letter wasn’t a put-on, because I doubt The Onion could do a better job at parodying gun-grabber cluelessness. Sure enough, gun owners were giving Rep. Crespo a well-deserved shellacking on his Twitter feed, and he actually doubled down on stupid over at his Facebook page.

Of course, this isn’t the only such example. My personal favorite is Shannon Watts getting the vapors over a gun that was about as benign as a firearm can get. She freaked out because it has a couple of features typically seen on “assault weapons” but are far from exclusive to them. It proved that the issue isn’t the function or power of a weapon, but the looks. It looks scary, so it should be banned.

It also explains the Kansas gubernatorial candidate who was blasted for taking part in a parade by riding with a replica firearm.

But this particular brand of stupid from Rep. Crespo was special. You see, while there was the emphasis in the original, what I’d like to emphasize is this claim: “high capacity magazines which turn regular firearms into fully automatic weapons.”

I think all my 30-round magazines are broken, then.

While Crespo claims a staffer conflated bump stocks and high capacity magazines, it doesn’t matter. No one on his staff bothered to note that no magazine does anything of the sort to a gun, probably because none of them know enough about firearms to understand just how dumb that sounded.

Anti-gun lawmakers are absolutely ignorant about guns, but that doesn’t stop them from pontificating endlessly about how we need new laws to regulate things they don’t understand. Kind of like regulating weapons with barrel shrouds.

In other words, they don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t seem to care to know what they’re talking about, which is why we can’t allow them to control the conversation.