Rep. Alan Grayson (D., Fla.) told a CNN reporter Sunday night that an AR-15 rifle is capable of firing 700 rounds per minute.
In the clip first posted by the Washington Examiner, the famously blustery congressman made the claim to Erin Burnett, following the terrorist attack by Omar Mateen on Sunday morning in Florida . Burnett did not dispel Grayson's statement, which is patently false.
An individual using an AR-15 would have to pull the trigger more than 10 times a second to fire off 700 rounds in one minute, and this excludes time needed for magazine changes.
"If he were who he were and he was not able to buy a weapon that shoots off 700 rounds in a minute, a lot of those people would still be alive," Grayson said. "If somebody like him had nothing worse to deal with than a Glock pistol, which was his other weapon today, he might have killed three or four people and not fifty."
The deadly rampage by Mateen was the worst mass shooting in American history with a death toll of 49.
"It's way too easy to kill people in America today and we have to think long and hard about what to do about that," Grayson said.
"Well, you are right about that. Thank you very much," Burnett said.
The Washington Examiner writes:
A semi-automatic like the Bushmaster AR-15 XM15-E2S has a maximum effective rate of fire of 45 rounds per minute, according to its manual.
Certain add-ons, including a "slide fire stock," make it possible for one to increase an AR-15's rate of fire. At this moment, though, there's nothing to indicate that Mateen modified his rifle prior to the attack this weekend.
A semi-automatic rifle like the one used in Orlando has a typical cyclic firing rate of 600 rounds per minute, but this figure accounts only for how fast the rifle is capable of cycling through rounds. It does not take into account magazine changes, or the fact that firing multiple rounds without pause will cause the rifle to overheat and jam.