Does it Matter That The Shooter Used an MCX?

I really don’t have high expectations when it comes to the media and guns, however I really don’t expect the media to grok the difference between an AR-15 and a Sig MCX, which is apparently what the Pulse nightclub shooter used. Yes, I get it’s not an AR. But it looks an awful lot like one, and from an end user point of view, they function the same. Any argument you’re going to make against the AR-15 you can make against the MCX just as effectively, and the rhetoric to support civilian ownership of both is identical. So practically speaking, what difference does it make?

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18 thoughts on “Does it Matter That The Shooter Used an MCX?”

  1. They can’t even grok the difference between “automatic” and “semi-automatic”, so that’s no surprise.

    This is the kind of line that is more effective in a calm, measured, one-on-one conversation if you want to push your interlocutor back on his or her heels for a moment. Not really a mass consumption thing because it just make you sound pedantic (which most of us gun folk have a problem with already.)

    1. I’d second this.

      In the right situatoin with the right tone, pointing out that either the person your debating with or someone they are citing is wrong of a very basic fact, can open them, if even slightly, to “Oh well if I was wrong about that…”

    2. in the old days of yore, automatic meant that it would load the next round; not that you could hold the trigger down for and continue to fire.

      No that they would know the difference….

  2. I can understand the initial confusion, however, from here on out, if they call it an AR15, it’s like confusion a 1965 Falcon coupe with a 1965 Mustang. Technically, they’re kinda built with somewhat of the same parts, but they are different items. Altogether.

  3. It doesn’t matter in the sense that the AR 15 is no more dangerous than any other semi auto.

    It does matter when you are responding to a ban the AR 15 because we have to do something crowd, in that it wasn’t even an AR 15 that was used.

  5. Anybody who doesn’t already understand the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect won’t care that the press is slapping a close-but-not-correct label on the weapon in use. The ones who do, don’t need to be told that the press is slapping a close-but-no-cigar label on the weapon.

  6. Didn’t matter to most journalists when the navy yard shooter used a manual pump shotgun:

    They desperately needed it to be an AR-15.

    1. Hate to be a bother Sebastian, but this link is messing up the formatting of the comment section.

  8. Yes, it does. See, if they ban the AR-15 by name, then all other M4geries are free to be sold. So then they have to define what an assault weapon is. They tried that in 1994, and failed miserably, because people simply removed the bayonet lugs and continued making them.
    If you cannot accurately describe something, then how in the world can you pass legislation prohibiting it?

    1. Oh, but we CAN accurately (and non-arbitrarily) define “assault weapon”, according to Hillary.

      Hillary said it, I believe it, that settles it.

  9. Pingback: SayUncle » Does it matter if the shooter used an AR-15?

  10. The distinction may not change much in the discussion of assault-style rifles, but I think it’s concerning that this factual detail is still being so widely misreported. Is it purely a coincidence that the gun being mistakenly inserted into the story is also the very model that gun control activists have long been the most vocal about?

    I hope that journalists would oppose on principle the idea of publishing descriptions that are not true. Shouldn’t we think it’s a bad thing when that happens? And why couldn’t something like this have been fact-checked? Are there certain facts that are less likely to be checked when they confirm certain narratives?

  11. At the gym last night MSNBC was on. Maddow was showing the Sig ad for the MCX – a guy doing some 3-gun type target shooting with it.

    The breathless pantshitting was hilarious. Literally everything they said about the gun that wasn’t a direct quote from the ad was wrong. You would think a major news outlet would have even one person on staff who knows the first thing about firearms.

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