Our lawmakers are failing us. Our country’s media has failed us. The knee-jerk reaction to the shooting in Sandy Hook is once again threatening to strip rights from law abiding citizens. I’m not going to talk about that, though. I’m not going to belittle their tragedy by putting myself on a soapbox for my own, personal agenda. What I will talk about is the media, firearms, and a general lack of understanding people like Bob Costas seem to have when it comes to the topic.
I’d like everyone to take a step back from mourning, pretending to care, from overreacting, and from spouting bullshit. If you can’t do that, stop reading right now. For the rest of you armed with common sense, we’re going to have a discussion and hopefully shed some light on some of the crap coming out of our media.
First, we need to stop demonizing firearms. They’re an inanimate object. The evil is found within the hearts of those who take the lives of innocents. They do it with guns in America, knives in China, homemade bombs in Ireland, etc, etc. The methods differ but the root of the problem remains the same: people. That is indisputable. If you feel like arguing that point just remember the part where you agreed to remove yourself from the personal and look at things objectively for once in your life.
Along with demonizing comes editorials about how automatic firearms should be illegal–they already are, and the people who can own them are not the problems. They’ll talk about how assault rifles are powerful killing machines. They’ll go so far as to quote the FPS at which a bullet is fired out of them as a testament to how dangerous the guns are …but hunting rifles are okay. Well, here’s some news: most hunting rifles are considerably more powerful than an assault rifle. They fire a much larger bullet. The amount of energy they create is easily double that of an assault rifle. They are designed to kill things much, much larger than a human being. The only difference here is they don’t come with a black stock and a pistol grip.
And that really is the problem. People see the matte black finish and they lose their mind. They freak out. IT’S GOING TO KILL US ALL, IT’S BLACK! If we were talking about people here we’d be racist. Here’s an example:
http://www.ruger.com/products/mini14RanchRifle/models.html
This is a Ruger mini-14. It’s a semiautomatic rifle. It comes in a variety of colors. Can you hunt with it? Sure! I know people who have used a mini-14 to hunt. Let’s take a look at another rifle.
http://www.ruger.com/products/mini14TacticalRifle/models.html
What’s that? If you said “assault rifle” here comes the mind fuck–THEY ARE THE SAME RIFLE. The only difference here is one comes with a black plastic stock that features a pistol grip. They fire the same cartridge at the same speed and can hold the same size magazine–again, THEY ARE THE SAME RIFLE.
The assault rifle you are so afraid of is not an assault rifle at all. It is not any more dangerous than a hunting rifle, or a handgun, or a shotgun–all of which are equally deadly in the hands of a lunatic. The news media are BRAINWASHING you to further their own political agenda. They want you to be afraid of the black plastic, because it somehow turns the firearm into a “killing machine”. Let’s quote a little from the good old Washington Post, shall we?
“THE BUSHMASTER .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday is a frightful killing machine.”
Right off the bat you hate the rifle because it’s a “killing machine”. It’s now associated with a horrible massacre of school children (again, we’re taking a step back here, don’t get emotional on me now).
“A coroner said most of the victims were hit with at least three bullets — and some with up to 11 — that exploded with devastating lethality, tearing them apart from inside. The Bushmaster was a juggernaut of death.”
This is my favorite part. It’s like they hired Stephen King to write the editorial. It was a juggernaut of death–that’s gold. And people still don’t think the media have their own agenda? They’re using these tragedies to make you hate. They’re trying to fuel knee-jerk politics with these colorful, misleading anecdotes. I read another article the other day where they talked about how the “Bushmaster” rifle that was used could fire six shots a second. That’s more bullshit trying to sway your emotions. It’s a semiautomatic rifle. Let’s break it down:
The “automatic” from the phrase is referring to the gun’s action (the part that houses the firing mechanism, ejector, etc). Prior to machine guns, as they were originally called, we had manual action firearms. Once fired you had to manually eject the cartridge in order to load another into the firing chamber. Machine guns removed the manual part of the equation. When fired, it used some of the energy created by the explosion to automatically eject the empty and load a new round into the firing position so you didn’t have to.
Semiautomatic weapons stop there. One pull of the trigger fires one bullet, and the automatic action removes the empty and loads another cartridge. That’s it. If you want to shoot again you have to pull the trigger a second time. Fully automatic weapons will continue to fire as long as the trigger is held down. The rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting was a semiautomatic. That hasn’t stopped the news media from telling you it’s a military rifle, an automatic rifle, can shoot X bullets per second, etc. All of these statements are false and are used to force you into an emotional response–to demonize the firearm.
I don’t care if you hate guns, the gun community, or even me. I really couldn’t give a shit. But at the very least you should know what you’re hating and why you’re hating it, and aren’t just repeating what the talking heads want you to think. Unfortunately, our representatives are spewing bullshit at the federal level. They want to ban things and they don’t even understand what they’re banning. Can we have a fucking intelligent discussion with our policy makers? I doubt it. How some of these people end up elected is beyond me.