CNN Senior Justice Correspondent Evan Perez inaccurately claimed Wednesday that semiautomatic firearms could fire “dozens of bullets” with a single pull of the trigger while covering a Minneapolis shooting.
An active shooter opened fire during an all-school mass held by the Annunciation Catholic School on Wednesday morning, killing at least two children and injuring 17. Perez made the comments on “The Situation Room” before there was any official information about the type of firearm used.
“It was really disturbing to hear what the man we heard from the affiliate said about how long it went on,” co-host Pamela Brown said. “He said there were several minutes. Now, we don‘t know if that was just from the shooter or if law enforcement had arrived by then, or the circumstances around that. But he said it sounded like the gun was reloaded several times. It seemed like a rifle, he said, a semiautomatic rifle and it went on for several minutes.”
WATCH:
“Right. And look, that’s not, that’s not uncommon as well. These things can shoot dozens of bullets, you know, in just one trigger pull, right?” Perez said. “And so, what happens in this case is sometimes they have enough time to reload. It’s one of the most horrific things for students to be sitting there. You saw this in Uvalde. You see this in Newtown, repeatedly, where a shooter has enough time to reload and the horrific nature of this is, you know, for little kids to be facing this.”
Information on how semi-automatic firearms operate is available on numerous websites easily accessible through a simple search on the internet conducted by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
CNN did not respond to a request for comment from the DCNF about Perez’s comments.
“What has incorrectly been termed an ‘assault weapon’ is a semi-automatic firearm that fires just one bullet with each pull of the trigger (versus a fully automatic firearm — machine gun — which continues to shoot until the trigger is released),” the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) said in a fact sheet.
Under current federal law, it is illegal to possess a fully-automatic firearm that is not registered under the provisions of the National Firearms Act, according to an article on the NRA website.
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