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He doesn't sound like a republican to me.
Guy defending making a weapon near fully automatic to skirt the letter of the law, not republican? Sounds pretty Republican.
The dude didn't even speak about weapons in his comment, he simply said the judicial branch isn't supposed to enforce laws based on what they should have been written but as they are. It's the fault of the legislative branch that the only legislation they have to tackle this problem is from the 1930s, but that doesn't mean the courts are allowed to enforce what law should mean when it's written in a legally explicit way, that's a form of legislation from the bench. All of that is simply just how the judicial branch works, it seemed to me much more an explanation than a defense.
Chiming back in here to say that yes, that was exactly my point.
To maybe make it a little clearer, a hypothetical: imagine a Republican-controlled state enacts a law banning late term abortions and makes it punishable with jail time for women to receive one.
That hypothetical law includes a clause defining a late term abortion as one taking place at any time past 37 weeks from conception.
A woman has an abortion at 36 weeks pregnant. Anti-abortion activists insist that she should be culpable under the law; an abortion at 36 weeks is functionally the same as an abortion at 37 weeks and 36 weeks is very obviously late term pregnancy, they claim.
If the local sheriff then arrests that woman, is the sheriff behaving lawfully?
That's why the government being bound to the letter of the law is so incredibly important. A law can be stupid, harmful, regressive, or otherwise bad in any number of ways, but if the government must act within the law as written, then at least we know what rules we're playing by and can work to change them.
If the government is allowed to arbitrarily and capriciously ignore the letter of the law in favor of what the people enforcing it wish the law were, that will be abused by bad actors. That sort of thing is more or less a universal component of authoritarianism.
tl;dr - we shouldn't do it because allowing it will allow it to be used against us.