I’m certain that Ted Cruz offered this look into Texas-style bacon as a celebration of his leading status within the Hot Air survey, so …. you’re welcome. What could appeal more to conservatives than a demonstration of appreciation for the Second Amendment and for bacon? Cruz combines the two into this tongue-in-cheek video for IJ Review:

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, on Monday released a new video where he shows off a method for cooking bacon with a machine gun.

“Few things I enjoy more than on weekends cooking breakfast with the family. Of course in Texas, we cook bacon a little differently than most folks,” Cruz says in a new video from IJ Review.

Cruz then takes up a machine gun with a strip of bacon wrapped around its nozzle. After firing off several rounds, the senator picks a piece of sizzling meat off the end and eats it approvingly.

Top Chef it ain’t, but it’s still pretty amusing, especially to watch Cruz have so much fun with the bit. It’s also not exactly a machine gun — it’s an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle. A machine gun is fully automatic.  That might seem a bit pedantic, but it’s a point we’d usually emphasize when debating gun-rights issues with people who think any rifle with a magazine is a machine gun. However, it’s Cruz and IJR that use this description, and admittedly, “semi-automatic rifle bacon” does not trip as lightly off the tongue. It’s all about the marketing, man.

Now, if you want real machine-gun bacon, you want to see Top Shot‘s Dustin Ellerman, who put out this video in March:

IJR’s Benny Johnson reports that it took four magazines of 5.56 ammo to get this bacon ready to serve. That’s one mighty expensive slice of bacon. If that’s how Texans cook their breakfasts, no wonder we’ve faced ammo shortages. I wonder how Texans grill steaks …