BY Herschel Smith
12 years, 1 month ago
Politifact:
A National Rifle Association website fires several shots at U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s voting record. The NRA has given an “F” to Nelson and an “A” to his opponent U.S. Rep. Connie Mack IV, R-Fort Myers.
One of the attacks on the website says: “Bill Nelson voted for a ban on millions of commonly owned firearms, which included many popular hunting and target rifles.”
In this fact-check, we wanted to explore if the NRA accurately described Nelson’s vote on a gun ban. The attack relates to a 2004 vote Nelson took in favor of extending the assault weapons ban of 1994. The vote to extend it came in the form of an amendment that passed the Senate 52-47 on March 2, 2004.
The amendment was to a bill to prohibit civil lawsuits from being brought against gun manufacturers and distributors for damages from misuse of firearms. The overall bill overwhelmingly was defeated 8-90 with Nelson voting “no” in the majority — so that meant the effort to extend the ban also failed.
You just can’t make this up. And of course the bill later passed without the stupid amendment to extend the assault weapons ban. The reason the assault weapons ban was tagged on to begin with was to prevent Republicans from voting for it. It’s a common tactic in the Senate. So in other words, the Democrats didn’t want the bill to protect firearms manufacturers to pass, and so they added the assault weapons ban extension so that the Republicans would have to kill it. Nelson voted for the assault weapons ban (anathema to gun owners like me) in order to prevent the firearms manufacturers from being protected (again, anathema to gun owners like me). And Politifact wants to spin this as some sort of lie by the NRA because, get this, Nelson and the democrats succeeded in their anti-gun goals.
Judgment: Politifact is lying. Their charge is false as shown by the truth-o-meter below.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. It’s just Politifact.
