Mitt Romney has claimed that the suspect in the Aurora theater mass-shooting obtained his weapons illegally, thus showing the inefficacy of passing any new gun laws — but the Associated Press reports that the opposite is in fact the case:
“This person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them,” Romney told NBC News in an interview. “And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t.”
Holmes broke no laws when he purchased an assault-style rifle, a shotgun and Glock handgun, and he passed the required background checks.
Holmes apparently booby-trapped his apartment with explosives. It’s unclear if he obtained the materials illegally, but it’s against Colorado law to build an explosive device.
