Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s false claims about his knowledge of guns

Feb 10, 2020 | Featured

Pete Buttigieg has frequently called on his military training in making points on gun control. For example this is something that we wrote up after the Miami Democratic Presidential Debate in June last year.

No self-respecting military in the world uses semi-automatic weapons. South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg knows that, but he’d rather give people the impression that military weapons are pervasive. “As someone who trained on weapons of war, I can tell you that there are weapons that have absolutely no place in American cities or neighborhoods ever,” he said on Thursday night.

In an interview on CNN in August 2019, there is this:

“I think the weapons of war can do no good in American neighborhoods,” Buttigieg, an Afghanistan War veteran, said on “New Day.” “I trained on weapons that are similar to these, and they have one purpose, which is to destroy as much as possible as quickly as possible. They have tactical uses in war zones. Since when are American cities and neighborhoods supposed to be war zones?”

The above clip is from Buttigieg speaking to a crowd in Des Moine, Iowa on Wednesday, April 17, 2019.

As someone who is very familiar with my military training with weapons of war, someone who carried a rifle and a pistol around a foreign land as a war was present, there are some weapons that just don’t belong in our neighborhoods in peace time in America.

But a new article in the Wall Street Journal indicates that he completely skipped being trained on “weapons of war” (emphasis added).

Mr. Buttigieg’s stint in the Navy isn’t as impressive as he makes it out to be. His 2019 memoir is called “Shortest Way Home,” an apt description of his military service. He entered the military through a little-used shortcut: direct commission in the reserves. The usual route to an officer’s commission includes four years at Annapolis or another military academy or months of intense training at Officer Candidate School. ROTC programs send prospective officers to far-flung summer training programs and require military drills during the academic year. Mr. Buttigieg skipped all that—no obstacle courses, no weapons training, no evaluation of his ability or willingness to lead. Paperwork, a health exam and a background check were all it took to make him a naval officer. . . .

Democratic candidates continually promise to ban semi-automatic rifles such as AR-15s, even though they function just like small-game hunting rifles. They fire the same small caliber bullets, and do so with the same velocity and rapidity (one bullet per pull of the trigger). Democrats may label it a “weapon of war,” but no self-respecting military in the world would use these semi-automatic rifles.

johnrlott

6 Comments

  1. scott norris

    Mayor Pete… what a waste of a human shell. Liar extraordinaire. He never had any weapons training. LIAR.

    He never led men, except to his bedroom.

    He never taught anyone anything other than how to be gay.

    Why would anyone even consider voting for this garbage?

    • JustARandomDude

      He led men to his fourth point of contact quite often, though.

  2. David L Miller

    There are 30,000 gun related deaths per year by firearms, and this number is not disputed. U.S. population 328,735,259 as of Monday, May 6, 2019. Do the math: 0.000912588% of the population dies from gun related actions each year. Statistically speaking, this is insignificant! What is never told, however, is a breakdown of those 30,000 deaths, to put them in perspective as compared to other causes of death:

    • 65% of those deaths are by suicide which would never be prevented by gun laws

    • 15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty

    • 17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug related or mentally ill persons – gun violence

    • 3% are accidental discharge deaths

    So technically, “gun violence” is not 30,000 annually, but drops to 5,100. Still too many, Right? Well, first, how are those deaths spanned across the nation?

    • 480 homicides (9.4%) were in Chicago

    • 344 homicides (6.7%) were in Baltimore

    • 333 homicides (6.5%) were in Detroit

    • 119 homicides (2.3%) were in Washington D.C. (a 54% increase over prior years)

    So, 25% of all gun crime happens in just 4 cities. All 4 of those cities have strict gun laws, so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause.

    This leaves 3,825 for the entire rest of the nation, or about 75 deaths per state. That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others. For example, California had 1,169 and Alabama had 1.

    Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far? California, of course, but understand; This is not guns causing this, it’s a crime rate spawned by the number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states. So if all cities and states are not created equally, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths.

    Sure, 5,100 deaths per year is horrific…How about in comparison to other deaths? All death is sad and especially so when it is in the commission of a crime, but that is the nature of crime. Robbery, death, rape, assault all is done by criminals and thinking that criminals will obey laws is ludicrous. Hence the reason they are labeled criminals.

    Gun homicides are overwhelmingly tied to gang violence. In fact, a staggering 80% of gun homicides are gang-related. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), gang homicides accounted for roughly 8,900 of 11,100 gun murders in both 2010 and 2011. That means that there were just 2,200 non gang-related firearm murders in both years

    But, what about other deaths each year?

    • 638,169 legal induced abortions in the US (CDC – 2015, nothing more current)

    • 40,000+ die from a drug overdose–THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT!

    • 36,000 people die per year from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths

    • 34,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (exceeding gun deaths even if you include suicide)

    • For the last 19 years, from 1999 to 2017, there were 2,467 children killed in fatal accidents involving bicycles, versus 1,994 children killed in fatal accidents involving a firearm. Are we ready to ban bicycles?

    Now it gets good:

    • 200,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical errors. You are safer in the Chicago streets than in Cook County hospital!

    • 600,000-plus die each year from cancer.

    • 710,000 people die per year from heart disease.

    It’s time to stop the double cheeseburgers, and any other ‘bad-for societal good food’! So what’s the point? If our lawmakers and the anti-gun movement focused their attention on heart disease, even a 10% decrease in cardiac deaths would save twice the number of lives annually of all gun-related deaths (including suicide, law enforcement, etc.). A 10% reduction in medical errors would be 66% of the total gun deaths or 4 times the number of criminal homicides……Simple, easily preventable 10% reductions!

    So you have to ask yourself, in the grand scheme of things, why the focus on guns? It’s pretty simple:

    Taking away guns gives control to governments.

    The founders of this nation knew that regardless of the form of government, those in power may become corrupt and seek to rule as the British did by trying to disarm the populace of the colonies. It is not difficult to understand that a disarmed populace is a controlled populace. Thus, the second amendment was proudly and boldly included in the U.S. Constitution. It must be preserved at all costs.

    Remember, when it comes to “gun control,” the important word is “control,” not “gun.”

    “In his paper titled “How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution,” Kopel claims that various gun control policies by the British following the Boston Tea Party, including a ban on firearm and gunpowder importation, tells us not only the purpose of the Second Amendment, but its relevance within the context of today’s gun control debate.

    “The ideology underlying all forms of American resistance to British usurpations and infringements was explicitly premised on the right of self-defense of all inalienable rights,” Kopel writes. “From the self-defense foundation was constructed a political theory in which the people were the masters and government the servant, so that the people have the right to remove a disobedient servant. The philosophy was not novel, but was directly derived from political and legal philosophers such as John Locke, Hugo Grotius, and Edward Coke.”

    Kopel writes that two important things underlined the American response to the British policies. One was the practical concept of self-defense, which British disarmament measures was making more difficult. The other, and more relevant concept, was that “Americans made no distinction between self-defense against a lone criminal or against a criminal government.”

    Researchers such as Gary Kleck and others estimate that firearms are successfully used for self-defense many more times than most people imagine: “The estimates of the annual number of defensive uses of guns in the United States range from 760,000 to 3.6 million, with the best estimate, derived from the NSDS, being 2.5 million, compared to about a half a million incidents in which offenders used guns to commit a crime (Kleck 1997, pp. 149-160, 187-189; see also the more recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of Ikeda, Dahlberg, Sacks, Mercy, and Powell 1997, which estimated 1.0 million defensive gun uses linked with burglaries in which the intruder was seen, compared to 0.9 million such incidents derived from the Kleck-Gertz survey, 1995, pp. 184-185, estimates within sampling error of each other)…..” Why don’t feckless politicians include statistics that find firearms SAVE peoples’ lives? Because control over the people IS impossible IF the people can defend themselves against the tyranny of Government.

    Further reductions in violence in America can be attributed to the sheer numbers of citizens exercising their right to bear arms. In October 2019, FBI 2018 Crime in the United States report revealed that Concealed Carry Permit Holders increased again, now 304% more CCWs than in 2007. That means 18.66 MILLION citizens now have a concealed carry permit and represent the largest cross-section of Americans imaginable —- again, violent crimes continue to go down, almost as if criminals know they just might be on the wrong end of ‘a good guy with a gun’.

    ANY politician or bureaucrat, including judges who would infringe upon our inalienable rights as described under the Constitution and Bill of Rights should be denied public office, and removed from office, if serving, for abdicating their oath to office –

    Please feel free to share this information far, wide and often – American citizens deserve to know the truth!

    *** Stats were gathered from the FBI’s Crime Database, the CDC’s fatal-injury database, and various search engines….

    • johnrlott

      Thanks, David, but there are too many errors here for me to take the time to go through this. So you are saying that there are 4,500 people killed each year by police? Seriously? Do you have a source on this? In 2017, there were 14,542 homicides in the US, and that is excluding (imperfectly) homicides in legal intervention. And so on.

  3. Cecil Nicholas

    It takes more than a dd214 to be a weapons expert. I served 10 years and I’m not an expert either. So, you are not qualified to tell Americans what they can have to protect their families. You decide for you and I’ll decide for myself because it’s our constitutional rights.

  4. Alan Cunha

    His greatest knowledge of guns is how to hold one properly for a photo op.

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