Jason Crow
Democrat candidate for the Sixth Congressional District, Jason Crow, and his supporters are inexplicably excited about a new video ad that his campaign recently released in which he rails against gun violence. There is just one (ok, there may be more) problem with the piece – Crow is blatantly misleading viewers by saying, “these are the weapons I needed in Iraq and Afghanistan and, now, they’re tearing our communities apart.”
That’s false. The Army does not use AR-15s, the much maligned weapons used in the Parkland attack, for example. Most soldiers now use M4s (the M allegedly stands for military). Previously, soldiers used M16s, which were fully automatic weapons. M4s are similar to AR-15s; however, the key difference is the ability to use either an automatic firing mechanism or a three-round burst, neither of which the AR-15s have. With AR-15s, it’s one round per trigger pull, unless it’s modified, like every other gun.
It may seem like a distinction without a difference, but this is actually the crux of Crow’s argument. Civilians are not permitted to have fully automatic weapons like M4s or M16s. Full stop. So, when he says that the guns he used while deployed are the same ones used in school shootings, that’s just not true and he knows it. Any military veteran knows it.
One of the core Army values is integrity. Crow is a former Army Officer and if he is going to use his veteran status to bolster his campaign effort, he should still exhibit those core values. Crow is maliciously lying and conflating these two, yes powerful, weapons. If he will lie about something so basic, that is common knowledge among so many, what else is he lying about?