As a life-long member of America’s gun culture, I often find the mainstream media infuriating for a number of reasons, something I’m sure most fans of self-preservation have experienced. Even when reporting “good news,” the mainstream media often manages to either inject their inherent pro-statist bias, and/or get salient facts completely wrong. In the case of an Oct. 14 piece by Reuters, written by Scott Malone in Boston and “edited” by Tom Brown, both bias and bull abound.
The good news the story is reporting is that a judge has dismissed the asinine lawsuit a bunch of families who lost loved ones at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Dec. 2012 tried to bring against the great Remington Arms Company.
“The lawsuit, filed in December 2014 and seeking unspecified financial damages, said the AR-15 military-syle (sic) assault weapon used in the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, should never have been sold to the gunman’s mother, Nancy Lanza, because it had no reasonable civilian purpose. Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis sided with Remington Arms, the North Carolina-based maker of the rifle known as the Bushmaster that 20-year-old Adam Lanza used in his rampage at Sandy Hook. The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act protected Remington from being sued for the use of its products in an illegal manner, Bellis ruled,” reads a paragraph from near the end of the objective part of the article.
Let’s just look at the basis of the suit: the rifle should have never been sold to the woman Adam Lanza stole it from because it “had no reasonable civilian purpose.” According to whom? It doesn’t say. And why should any company be held responsible for the deliberate misuse of their products? Had it been allowed to proceed, wouldn’t this case have set a precedent exposing automakers to liability for the actions of drunk drivers? I mean, wouldn’t it? One would think it might; and today, such isn’t just an idle thought to ponder. The next president, Hillary Clinton, has pledged to remove this vital protection from gun makers specifically – because honesty, intellectual or otherwise, means nothing to her or her supporters.
But, since the Hildabeast hasn’t been enthroned yet, their lawsuit was tossed into the trash where it belongs. Speaking of trash, such is an apt description for the last two graphs of this hatchet job Reuters published.
“So-called assault rifles like the Bushmaster, capable of inflicting rapid carnage, have been used in several recent mass shooting in the United States. Those include the June attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that took 49 lives and was the deadliest shooting in U.S. history,” reads the penultimate ‘graph of the story.
First, “Bushmaster” is just the name of the maker of the particular AR-pattern rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting – there are more companies making complete AR rifles and components to reasonably list here, but there must be more than one hundred today, if not close.
“…capable of inflicting rapid carnage…” Again, the MSM must demonize guns and gun owners at every turn, so, they apply that descriptor to an inanimate object. Objectively and logically, a great many things are “capable of inflicting rapid carnage” when deliberately misused.
And, technically, the firearm used in the Orlando attack wasn’t a strict AR-pattern rifle, but rather a similar-looking, functionally-different rifle made by Sig Sauer. And, if the 5.56×45 NATO / .223 Remington round is so powerful and deadly, why were there still more wounded than dead inside the Pulse nightclub, even after the cops gave everyone three hours to bleed out before entering?
“The AR-15 was developed from the U.S. military’s M-16 rifle, used in the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Unlike the military version, the AR-15 is not fully automatic, meaning users must pull the trigger each time they want to fire a shot,” reads the hilarious last paragraph of the article.
I don’t know if Malone here is just ignorant and was writing the article on an old Smith-Corona somewhere without Internet access, or was just too lazy to fact-check himself (as was his editor, apparently) or if he’s just trying to deliberately mislead people. Whatever the circumstance, he has the origin of the Armalite 15 all wrong.
Eugene Stoner designed the AR-10 in .308 caliber for the Armalite company in the late 1950s. The rifle was then substantially re-scaled and re-designed to accommodate the much smaller .223 Remington cartridge, and the new rifle was dubbed AR-15. From there, it was slowly and grudgingly adopted by the U.S. military as the M-16. Some cost-cutting measures in the manufacturing process nearly doomed the rifle before it could gain acceptance, as it was prone to jamming in the field. After those were rectified (basically by going back to Stoner’s original design specs), the rifle caught on and has been in service with the U.S. military since the Vietnam era, receiving upgrades and modifications along the way.
The original AR-15, which was always a semi-automatic rifle, steadily gained traction among recreational shooters over the decades as well; becoming the most popular rifle in America today by a huge margin. It was not “developed from” the M-16, as the article falsely claims, but rather the military adopted the basic pattern of Stoner’s design, adding full-auto capability and later three-round-burst fire to the rifle.
It might not be “Dewey Defeats Truman” but inaccurate reporting is inexcusable in this day and age when everyone has access to information. The fact that such inaccuracies were printed anyway leads me to suspect it was done deliberately.
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