FACT-CHECK: Shredding Cory Booker And David Hogg’s Hilariously Uninformed Statements About Toy Guns

One of the more prominent members of the Democratic Party’s ultra-leftist front and the millennial poster boy for gun-grabbing: it’s a match made in the sweltering pit of hell.

In yet another stunning affirmation of my thesis that we should probably not look to anyone on social media for information or affirmation in matters of politics, Sen. Cory Booker beat his own personal best in making wildly inaccurate claims to push an agenda.

While there are plenty of things to disagree with Booker about, gun control is the issue on which he’s the most rabidly vocal. In a recent tweet, the New Jersey legislator made the terse argument that America actually regulates toys more thoroughly than it does firearms.

No, I’m not joking. Behold:

Although this incredible statement is begging, pleading to be fact-checked, an annoying amount of lemmings followed right along and gave Sen. Booker their hearty “amens,” perhaps most notably The Hogginator himself:

Oh, David. That just hurts to read. Before even attempting to untangle the fallacious web these boys have woven, let’s clear up one thing:

R-E-G-U-L-A-T-E-D. Not “regelated,” although maybe that’s how it’s said in some of the soggier parts of Florida, I wouldn’t know.

Cheap shots at Hogg’s typo aside, what is the “Consumer Protection Act”? I may not be a very smart person, but I do have Google and that’s a close second.

I think it’s safe to deduce that Mr. Hogg must mean the Consumer Product Safety Act, which gives a permanent committee within the federal government the “power to develop safety standards and pursue recalls for products that present unreasonable or substantial risks of injury or death to consumers,” as well as to ban products that are deemed inherently unsafe, like those evil Kinder Chocolate Eggs.

So, now that we’ve got that tidbit cleared up, why don’t we put firearms within the jurisdiction of the Consumer Product Safety Committee? I mean, don’t guns kill people and stuff?

Guys, it’s really not that difficult. Firearms, as well as food, drugs, cosmetics, medical devices, tobacco, motor vehicles, pesticides, aircraft, and boats are simply regulated by other government bodies.

Hogg could’ve been spared this embarrassment if he’d just taken a trip over to my beloved Wikipedia, where he’d find that such products “fall under the purview of agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Environment Protection Agency, and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.”

To place firearms under the jurisdiction of the CPSC would be asinine. The standards to which firearms are already manufactured under the auspices of the ATF make them perfectly safe to handle and use for the consumer. Trying to place them under the CPSC to get a ban on the technicality that part of their use may involve harm to someone other than the consumer (the person trying to harm them, their family, or another innocent member of the public, for example) is some shifty, slimy stuff.

Aside from the outright ban Booker and Hogg are gunning for (puns always intended here), the ATF already holds gun manufacturers to stringent standards for production, marketing, and holds dealers to a strict code as well.

Heck, when an already made-and-marketed gun is found to be in violation of any ATF regulations, that sonofa gets recalled. And, closer to the aim of the CPSC, manufacturers of guns that malfunction are in no way shielded from penalties or lawsuits.

As for Sen. Booker’s original statements, the Washington Post so graciously did the legwork in fact-checking not only his insane tweet but also a pair of “misleading claims” made echoing the message that toy guns are somehow more regulated than the real thing:

“Most people don’t know that consumer product safety literally — one industry that’s been exempted is the gun lobby. So we have different regulations for toy guns and no regulations for the weapons on our streets that are killing so many people.”

— Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), interview on CNN, May 6, 2019

“Nowadays, there is more regulation over toy guns than real ones. While medicine, children’s toys, and any number of other consumer products are subject to regulation by the federal government, firearms are exempt. In other words, gun manufacturers have little incentive to make their products safer. Cory will work to close this loophole in federal oversight and allow the Consumer Product Safety Commission to ensure gun safety by making safety warnings and issuing recalls for faulty firearms.”

— Booker, in a Medium post, May 6

In their beautiful decimation of Booker’s “misleading” argument (read: lies), WaPo outlined the fact that the manufacture, sale, ownership, and use of firearms are heavily regulated by a myriad of agencies at the federal and state levels. Toy guns, however, not so much:

By contrast, there are no regulations governing the sale, distribution and ownership of toy guns, experts say. The main exception is a 1986 law that requires a blaze orange plug in the muzzle to distinguish toy guns from real guns. (Anecdotally, that’s the first thing a kid pulls off when he or she gets a new toy gun.)

Sadly, thousands of folks on Twitter (and who knows how many more out in the real world) will just go along with Booker and Hogg’s lies, fork over their own liberties, and demand that ours be taken as well. Let’s drop a few truth bombs and see if we can avoid that.