In an interview with the New Yorker Radio Hour, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson told New Yorker editor David Remnick that he would not limit access to semi-automatic rifles or discourage teachers from keeping arms in their classrooms. But before he made his opinion clear, he seemed to waver.
“I don’t think I’ve ever advocated, ‘Look, everyone should have more guns,’” Johnson said. “A situation like Orlando — I hope everybody paid attention to what happened in Orlando. I hope all the nightclub owners in the country were paying attention to the fact that all the doors were padlocked.”
Remnick reminded Johnson that a semi-automatic rifle, not a series of padlocked doors, was used to massacre 49 people. “We’re talking about the ready availability of weapons that one would think should be limited … to a field of war,” the editor said.
Johnson disagreed. “If you’re going to make those criminal, I think you’re going to have a whole new criminal class of people who aren’t going to turn in those weapons,” he said. “We should be allowed to exercise our Second Amendment rights, which would be the ability to own semi-automatic rifles.”