I applauded when I heard Romney say this but instinctively knew that he was going to get some flak for it. The problem isn’t that what he said was wrong (it isn’t) but that it is technically imprecise.
full-auto weapons obviously aren’t necessarily illegal, but they are subject to special restrictions.
Between like-minded and reasonable people this wouldn’t be an issue but leftists aren’t like-minded and they certainly aren’t reasonable. Leftists make good lawyers because they love to hair-split on the meanings of words. But they make lousy lawyers because they feeeeel that words mean whatever the hell they want them to mean.
Good thing that there’s a gun show this weekend - I need to find some like-minded and reasonable folks to hang out with ;-)
Part of the appeal for the socialists of the loony left is that they can try to make ‘Low-information’ voters think that this was a gaffe and they can elicit an emotional response to all these Machine guns floating around.
That’s that feeeeel part you mentioned.
Part of the hair splitting helps them in that they can also pretend that these guns aren’t ‘Technically’ illegal because of all the hoops that need to be jumped through to comply with the law.
This lie on their part is also a win-win since they can apply the same ‘logic’ later on to every other type of gun.
i.e. they could effectively outlaw all guns by regulating the excrement out of them but at the same time they can claim they are still ‘legal’.