Whoopi Goldberg seems to be under the impression that automatic weapons are available to the general public.
During Wednesday’s episode of “The View,” Goldberg pleaded with Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul on gun control and said that she couldn’t understand why “anyone objects to getting rid of automatic weapons.”
Automatic weapons are regulated by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and not available to the general public. Individuals must first be approved by the federal government for a special license by paying a $200 fee to the Internal Revenue Service and going through a process with the Treasury Department.
“Automatic weapons, they’re not for hunting. They do nothing — they’re only there to kill. And you’ll notice that a lot of things that happened are with automatic weapons,” she claimed to Paul. “When we see that why don’t we say, ‘Who really needs to have one other than people that are at war?’”

The crowd erupted in applause before Paul could explain that the very weapons Goldberg was referring to are already unavailable to the general public.
“Truly automatic weapons we don’t have,” he said. “We banned truly automatic weapons in I think 1934.”
Goldberg interjected, “But we still got a lot of them Rand. C’mon!”
“What we have is not automatic weapons,” Paul quipped back. “It’s semi-automatic. So they fire in a fairly fast sequence, but you can’t pull the trigger and they come like a machine gun. Those are no longer out there.”
Paul then explained that “people do hunt and people also do shooting and sports shooting and target shooting” with semi-automatic weapons.
“Come to Kentucky and I’ll introduce you,” he told Goldberg. “There are a lot of people who like and enjoy this as a sport.”
Paul added, “But the other problem is if we take ownership away of specific types of guns, you really have to modify — something that big has to be either legislation or possibly a Constitutional amendment.”
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