Birth of an Inflammatory Gun Term: ‘Law Enforcement-Style Shotgun’

Via Angry Mike

 

Trump this.

Reader Don N. writes:

Have you noticed the new moniker “law-enforcement-style shotgun”? I know you used it on TTAG earlier, but I think we are seeing a new piece of propaganda being born. I’ve seen it repeated in several articles the past few days. Propaganda trends are neat and if we expose them, then people may take offense to the propagandizers’ attempts at manipulating their perspectives . . .

The anti-gun media recognized their mistake calling a magazine a “clip” too late. Our response:

“These are two distinct and different pieces of equipment – shows how much you know.”  But they couldn’t just switch the terminology they already invested in, because that may confuse the audience they were propagandizing, so now we have the new moniker, “magazine-clip”.  I’ve seen the ubiquity of this term increase rapidly over the past several months among the anti-gun media and politicians. It’s an attempt to counter the “shows how much you know” response while at the same time not losing their propaganda investment in the word “clip”.

A long time ago we had rifles, lever rifles, bolt action rifles and semi-automatic rifles. We then began to have “service rifles” and “battle rifles” and later “assault rifles”.  All technical terms with specific meanings. Then the propagandizers chose (out of malicious intent, ignorance or both) to call our semi-autos “assault rifles”.  We pointed out that they weren’t “assault rifles” and why they aren’t any more special or capable compared to other semi-automatic rifles. “Shows how much you know, again”.

But they’d already invested greatly in the propaganda, telling people that these were the same weapons the military uses. And to counter our “shows how much you know,” they coined the mew moniker, “military-style assault rifles”.

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