Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) unintentionally drew a round of raucous applause Wednesday night when he said at a CNN town hall gathering that, to effectively ban assault weapons, “you would literally have to ban every semiautomatic rifle that’s sold in America.”
Later, he attempted to characterize support for a blanket ban on semiautomatic weapons as a fringe view. “Banning all semi-auto weapons may have been popular with the audience at #CNNTownHall, but it is a position well outside the mainstream,” he wrote on Twitter.
But the latest available polling shows that, in fact, more than half of Americans say they would support an across-the-board ban on all semiautomatic weapons. And academics who study gun violence say that such a ban would be an effective way to combat mass shootings and gun violence overall. CONT.
Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post
Recent polls: Guns