more fact checking?  fish/barrel?

President Barack Obama's Tuesday State of the Union address demagogued guns and gun accessories by describing civilian "assault rifles" as "weapons of war" and labeling the magazines they use as "massive."

"Police chiefs are asking our help to get weapons of war and massive magazines off the streets," Obama lamented, "because they are tired of being outgunned."

These descriptions are problematic, considering that the "massive magazines" are simply those that hold more than 10 rounds. Obama suggested multiple times that 10 rounds ought to be the legal cutoff. 

So now 11- and 12-round magazines are "massive," and "assault rifles" are "weapons of war." 

And as I've written in other posts, deaths involving "assault rifles" constituted less than .012 percent of all deaths in America in 2011. Obama's war-mongering hyperbole simply doesn't fit. 

But there's one more point to be made; police and federal law enforcement agencies are not "outgunned" by civilian AR-15s. 

Police agencies have AR-15s and train their officers in the tactical uses of them. And in many agencies, the AR variant they use is not the civilian variant but a select-fire MP4, which can be fired in semi-automatic or fully-automatic mode. The officer or agent chooses his desired mode with the flip of a switch.

One of my favorites: a gallon of gasoline now costs $4, more than double the price when Obama took office.   Obama didn’t mention that pump shock, but tried to minimize it by claiming, “We have doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas.”  Sorry Barry, but ordering it doesn't make it so.

But that is expected to happen only gradually over the next dozen years. “Under a deal the Obama administration reached with automakers in 2011, vehicles will have a corporate average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, twice the 27 miles per gallon, on average, that cars and trucks get today. Automobile manufacturers won’t start making changes to achieve the new fuel economy standards until model year 2017. Not all cars will double their gas mileage, since the standard is based on an average of a manufacturers’ fleet.” And, of course, that higher fuel mileage comes at a price because studies have consistently shown (including one by former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers) that lighter cars mean more deaths on the road.