Tales Told By Fools: Why The Media Can't Get Anything Right About Guns

Via Eric

Imagine a newspaper story on automobiles in which the writer confused camshafts and driveshafts. Or a piece on investing in which the words “stock” and “bond” were used interchangeably. Or one that referred to Marines as soldiers (which will get you a punch in the mouth from any self-respecting Jarhead). Not likely, you think. No reporter is that ignorant or that careless. Wrong. They are when they turn their attention to guns. Cartridge and bullet are used interchangeably, clip and magazine mean the same thing; submachine gun and machine gun are synonyms. And it gets worse.

When the M-16 was first issued during the Vietnam War, Americans were informed that it was deadly because its bullets tumbled through the air, creating terrible wounds when they hit. Anyone who has ever thrown a football knows what a crock this is. Apparently, news reporters do not throw footballs.

In a recent article in The New York Times, a reporter quoted a police officer as stating that a Smith & Wesson revolver went off when it was dropped. The handgun was made in the 1970s, so there is a problem: No Smith wheelgun of post-World-War-II manufacture can go off unless the trigger is pulled. Even if the revolver was cocked, it’s highly unlikely that it could fire. It sounds like the police officer told a Great Big Fib, but the reporter did not know enough about the subject (or, probably, anything about the subject) to call him on it.

In the 1990s, a newspaper Sunday supplement ran an article on gun control that used the term “ballistic footprint.” This was a new one to me so I called the magazine and asked the editor in chief what it meant. He said he had no idea but that he would check with his staff. He did, and no one else had a clue, either.

We are treated to almost-daily accounts of assault weapons that are supposedly being purchased at American gun shops and sent south of the border through an elaborate system of straw men, couriers, intermediaries, etc. But as the American Rifleman points out in its excellent article on the subject in its July issue, drug cartels are huge businesses with unlimited budgets. Why would they go to the trouble of buying two or three or a dozen guns in the U.S. when they could call their friendly arms merchant and get a pallet load of guns, still in the factory cosmoline, delivered right to their doors?

So why, when someone says “gun,” does a journalist’s common sense head for parts unknown?

First, there is a strong tendency among people not to challenge conventional wisdom. As proof of that, I offer the fact that from AD 200 until roughly 1850, western medicine was based on the teachings of a physician named Galen. Galen did not know that blood circulated, or that the heart pumped it. He blamed disease on an imbalance among four bodily humors (black bile, yellow bile, water, and phlegm), and drew his conclusions about human anatomy from dissections of monkeys and pigs, not humans. But for nearly two millennia, Galen was more revered than Oprah.

So we tend not to question, and from the unanimity of thought on the subject in the media, I believe that J-school students and cub reporters learn, very early on, that the following is the Revealed Truth:

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