Updated at bottom of post | Politico's Edward-Isaac Dovere might want to brush up on federal firearms law before he holds forth on "fact-checking" statements about the issue. During a "Truth Squad" segment reacting to Tuesday night's debate on the October 17 Jansing & Co., the Politico deputy White House editor told MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing that Romney "is not correct as the [federal] law currently stands" regarding automatic weapons. Romney told the debate audience last night that "we of course don't want to have automatic weapons, and that's already illegal in this country [for civilians] to have automatic weapons."
"The assault weapons ban expired, this was the law when Bill Clinton signed it in when he was president, but it expired under George Bush and it has not been renewed," Dovere noted, adding, "the way Congress is going at this point, it doesn't look like it will be." But Dovere is confusing the expired ban on so-called semiautomatic assault weapons with long-standing federal restrictions on automatic weapons.