Democrat Senator Jeanne Shaheen from New Hampshire told a radio station today people who buy AR-15s are “buying it to do bad things.”
Andrew Kaczynski at Buzzfeed reported:
Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said certain types of firearms like the AR-15 are the kind of guns that should be banned. She added that people trying to purchase the weapon — which is popular among American gun owners — are “buying it do bad things.”
“Well, I think people need to have their voices heard, and what I’ve heard from people in New Hampshire is they think there’s reasonable legislation that we can pass including things like looking at the types of weapons that so easy for people to get,” the New Hampshire Democrat said on Mitchell in the Morning on Monday.
“The fact is, the AR-15, the gun that (Omar) Mateen used, that’s a weapon of war; it’s advertised as being able do technologically advances in killing people that previous weapons have been unable to do and somebody who is buying that kind of a weapon isn’t buying it for target shooting,” she said. “They’re not buying it to go out and hunt deer. You don’t need an AK-47 or an AR-15 to hunt deer. They’re buying it to do bad things and we need to recognize that and address it.”
The National Shooting Sports Foundation says there are anywhere between 5 million to 10 million AR-15 rifles in the United States, according to CNBC.
The gun used by Omar Mateen in Orlando was not an AR-15.
