After any shooting, you’ll inevitably have inane articles like this:
Semiautomatic handguns are the weapon of choice for mass murderers because they are light and easy to conceal, and adaptable to using high-capacity magazines, experts say.
Experts should also say they are the weapon of choice for everyone, police, military, and armed citizens too. Why? They are inordinately useful for self-defense compared to the alternatives.
“There is no valid reason for civilians to have assault rifles, semiautomatic handguns and high-capacity magazines,” he said. “We have to start ratcheting down the firepower in civilian hands in the United States.”
Then why do ordinary citizens and the police overwhelmingly choose these for self-defense purposes? I love the logic that in police hands, suddenly these weapons become useful, even necessary, for self-defense, but me as some ordinary citizen, that I should be hobbled with a revolver, or an unwieldy shotgun or hunting rifle. The scary part is, who Greg McCune, the article’s author, is:
“I provide training for journalists in the Americas ranging from classroom, to online, eLearning, tip sheets, and blogging. I also serve as coordinator within Americas editorial for diversity issues and I run the Americas summer internship program.”
Teaching other journalists how to make one-sided hit pieces on gun ownership while apparently knowing little about firearms or firearm ownership. No wonder journalism as a profession is circling the bowl.
If “semiautomatic handguns are the weapon of choice for mass murderers”, why do the police carry them?
They must all be potential mass murderers.
We must disarm the police.
( hmmm … this sounds better the more I look at it … )
If someone is intent on killing a lot of people with a gun, making him choose two revolvers over a single Glock isn’t going to make much of a difference. In fact, revolvers are far less likely to jam, so it might even be a better choice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLk1v5bSFPw
I guess copy editors are in short supply, too:
” . . . . . said Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a nonprofit group that advocates to reduce gun violence.”
vs.
“The common thread binding the mass attacks together is that they all used semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines, Spearman said.”
I love it when the liberals who know nothing about a weapon opine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLk1v5bSFPw
When I pointed out to a colleague at work that an AR-15 was essentially a pimped out deer rifle, he was shocked, but then later admitted that looking scary did not in fact make the gun more threatening.
This “weapons of choice theme” is a common theme among gun grabbers. The CDC maintains a list of top ten guns criminial use, for example. Someone pointed out that this organization doesn’t have a “weapons of choice” for police officers, or citizen self defense, or competition, or other valid uses of guns.
Now that I think of it, someone should keep such a list, so that whenever someone says “weapons of choice for criminals and murderers”, we have a good comparison point.
Link no worky?
Here’s a working link:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/07/us-usa-wisconsin-shooting-weapon-idUSBRE87606820120807
I’ve fixed the link on the post. They changed it out. It’s amazing how clueless traditional media is about how things work on line. Changing URLs like that only screws you. There is no benefit. But they don’t get it.
To further my annoyance (now that I actually went to the link to read the article), they say “they used the same type of gun, a 9mm semi-auto”; this is akin to saying “bank robbers use the same type of vehicle, a four-door sedan, to get away”.
Gack! The terms are so general, they have almost no meaning!
[blockquote]Semiautomatic handguns are the weapon of choice for mass murderers because [/blockquote]
they are unoriginal copycats. Lord forbid one of the psychos ever discovers the firepower of gasoline. Google “Happy Land fire” for one example – the death toll there exceded the mass murder in Norway.
@ A Critic
Exactly right. Prior to 9/11 the Happy Land fire was the largest single mass murder in NYC history. Ten dollars of gas in a plastic can he found in an alley. Guns really are NOT the weapon of choice for killing large #s of people. Could Tim McVeigh have killed 168 people and wounded another 800 with a rifle and a handgun and all the ammo he could carry???? Take away all the guns and the casualties will go up astronomically for each new incident. Psychos would be forced to find new, cheaper more efficient means to kill large groups. What guns ARE good for, in the hands of skilled defenders, is surgically removing these isolated offenders.