35 Replies to “Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors”

  1. “Here’s what isn’t fair, though: Some readers seized this opportunity to accuse us of using this graphic to promote what they termed a specific liberal agenda on the topic of gun control. They saw our labeling mistake as a deliberate misrepresentation, one that made these weapons seem more dangerous. Let me say emphatically that this was a careless mistake, not an intentional deception nor bias.”
    Deliberate and intentional, or “useful idiot”, the effect is the same. Nice try, though.
    When is that asteroid going to show up?

  2. Don’t pull the trigger without anticipating the recoil.
    I bet even in their retraction they didn’t present a fair analysis of the criticism they received.

  4. “that this was a careless mistake”
    Yeah, problem is the careless mistakes never seem to happen the “other” way. Somehow. Wankers.

  5. “Assault weapon” is a pejorative term invented from whole cloth by Mr. Josh Sugarmann, currently director of the Violence Policy Center, previously of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns.
    “”Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.”
    -Josh Sugarmann, Assault Weapons and Accessories in America, 1988[9][10]
    It is a term created and used specifically for political propaganda, and as a result has no actual basis in fact.
    The American media continues to commit the most transparent and pervasive fraud against its own customers in modern history. May they all become paupers selling pencils on the street corners.

  6. What is an assault weapon? Well, to those of us who have closely followed the workings of the civilian disarmament movement (AKA gun control activism) an “Assault weapon” is anything they don’t like or that looks “bad” – which essentially is all modern arms which don’t have a cap or flint lock ignition system.
    Fact and objective evidence matters little to them (because gun grabbers are another arm of revisionist left-wing fascism) so the definition of “assault weapon” changes to whatever they are intent on banning/demonizing at any given time.
    It matters little to them that there is no listing in Jane’s Guns Recognition Guide for “assault weapon”. It matters little this neither a military term/definition nor a firearms industry term/definition. It matters little to them that no fully auto or select fire “assault carbine/battle rifle” is available legally to the public. It matters not that the AR 15 shares little with its military counterpart aside from cosmetics. It matters little that the AR15, AK and SKS civilian self-loading carbines are in wide use in the public domain as pest/varmint control as well as personal defense. It matters not that this class of self loading rifles with military cosmetics have never been involved in these mass shootings (until these last 2) these are NOT the weapon of choice of criminals, gangsters and the black market trade. None of these facts matter when you are making illogical appeals to emotion by branding something for confiscation which it is not.
    It is time for people who don’t own guns, even those who do not care for firearms personally, to wake up to what is going on here. You may not think you are affected because you do not own firearms let alone an “assault weapon”, but you are – you are intimately effected. Because if you allow a government which is under constitutional constraint from arbitrarily stealing the property of its citizens without demonstrable justification or compensation, that same government which has slipped its constitutional constraints on private property will soon be doing the same thing with any personal property it wishes to confiscate – from your bank account and home to your chattel assets – Any government which is belligerent enough to treat innocent people as criminals and steal their property on unfounded suspicion has engaged in tyranny – WAKE UP!!

  9. Assault – an unlawful physical attack upon another; an attempt or offer to do violence to another, with or without battery, as by holding a stone or club in a threatening manner.
    Weapon – any instrument or device for use in attack or defense in combat, fighting, or war, as a sword, rifle, or cannon.
    By definition pretty much anything can be an assault weapon. In Australia is started with semi automatic weapons banned; then moved down the list until all that’s left is bolt action and single shot – which may be next for them.

  10. Who exactly is that park for then?
    But why US? Here in Canada cities ‘close’ their parks at 11pm. If you decided to go for a walk at 11:01 you would be committing a trespassing offense.
    Does anything in Canada ever bother Kate?

  12. “Fact and objective evidence matters little to them (because gun grabbers are another arm of revisionist left-wing fascism) so the definition of “assault weapon” changes to whatever they are intent on banning/demonizing at any given time.” BINGO!
    Vern also had a bingo with, “By definition pretty much anything can be an assault weapon. In Australia is started with semi automatic weapons banned; then moved down the list until all that’s left is bolt action and single shot – which may be next for them.”

  13. I never understood fixation of gun banners on bayonet lugs and flash suppressors. This is some kind of fetish. Has ever mass murder been committed with bayonets on US soil over the last 100 years? Has any mass murderer ever attached bayonets to their bayonet lugs? I never heard of that. Why is lug so important then?
    Has ever mass murder been committed from a long distance where law enforcement struggled to discover the shooter’s position by looking for a muzzle flash at night? Muzzle flash is virtually invisible in sunlight. Sounds like AWB aimed at reducing only the murders committed at night. Mighty efficient…
    A-ha, now we are approaching the area the government is so afraid of mentioning: having military edge over population, which is not allowed by the BoR. Say it finally!

  15. Assault rifle. Stupidest term ever concocted.
    Probably dreamed up by a US military type. I mean, who else but the folks who brought us the term “visually acquire”, instead of “see”.

  16. The US military actually defines an “assault weapon”. Automatic fire capability is a prerequisite of the definition. By definition, semis are battle rifles, not assault rifles. The M4/M16 are assault rifles because of their 3-shot burst capability. The AR15 cannot be because its receiver can’t be refitted for auto fire. A new receiver casting is required and the M4/M16 parts fitted.
    Phantom has it exactly correct – Sugarman of the VPC is the culprit.

  17. 454guy, talking about fetishes, there’s a critter that frequently sends letters to the editor at the national post named Ron Charach, he’s even got to the point of tying his colonoscopy to banning the Ruger Mini-14.. We are blessed about once a week with his drivel on this subject.

  19. The term assault rifle was actually coined by A Hitler as “sturm gewehr. It described a new German army rifle in WW11. For more info, see the Wikipedia link someone else posted.

  20. The purpose of the flash hider is to shade the shooter’s sighting eye from the flash of his own weapon, so he isn’t temporarily blinded by the flash when shooting at night.
    Any person with a sight line other than directly behind the shooter will see the flash just fine.

  22. “What is an assault weapon”
    An assault weapon is a van full of legally purchased diesel and fertilizer mixture that had enough explosive power to bring down an entire building the size of a city block.
    An assault weapon is a hijacked plane that flies into one of the world’s tallest buildings.
    An assault weapon is a matchstick used to intentionally burn down a school or a home.
    See any correlations between them ALL?

  23. Thank you for pointing out the stupidity of the term.
    And the term ‘assault rifle’, is in the same league.

  24. It’s not quite as bad as depicted above here in Australia: each of the seven states have their own laws but they meet to try to make consistent laws.
    Here in my state, New South Wales, for the average person the state mandates:
    – Every gun owner is licensed,
    – Every firearm is individually licensed,
    – Only legitimate reasons for owning firearms are target shooting, hunting or collecting (self defence is explicitly out) with minimum range attendances or rural property permission (hunting)
    – Self loading (semi-auto) rifles are out,
    – Pump-action shotguns are out, some pump-action rifles are in,
    – Protruding handgrip longarms are out (thumb hole handgrips are in),
    – Detachable or folding stocks are out,
    – Minimum long arms barrel and overall length, and magazine capacity,
    – Handguns have a minimum barrel length,
    – Handguns have a maximum calibre: 9mm/.38/.357,
    – Handguns magazines are limited to 10 rounds,
    – Laser pointers of >1mW are out.

  25. Bill, your list shows how silly and random the rules are. You note that in Australia they mandated a maximum calibre for handguns. When they got all silly in Canada with new firearm regs, They effectively set a minimum calibre of handguns by banning a whole bunch of different small calibre guns like .25’s .32’s and 380’s.

  26. Jamie MacMaster >
    “And the term ‘assault rifle’, is in the same league.”
    Let’s be clear, there is indeed a clear distinction between an “Assault Rifle” and an “Assault Weapon”.
    An assault “rifle” was clearly defined in 1934 as an “automatic select fire weapon”. An “assault weapon” was defined in 1994 under Bill Clinton for semi-auto weapons using the accessories like pistol grips, collapsible stocks, and flash suppressors etcetera.
    Today they are going after Bill Clinton’s pathetic definition of certain firearms as “Assault weapons”. A ludicrous proposition considering the scale of devastation that can be created from legally accessible and generally inert products readily available to anyone.
    A kid with a chisel and a hammer could derail a passenger train. A woman with a grievance could poison her whole office or school with available solvents or medication. – SO WHAT IS AN ASSAULT WEAPON?

  27. From the article:
    “In an attempt to explain what makes a gun an “assault weapon,” we mistakenly labeled the gun’s sling attachment as a mount for a bayonet or grenade launcher.”
    Yes, that’s a bit of an error.
    Did they bother to ask a gun expert or did they just wing it? The latter, I think.

  28. Most of you guys are missing the point. The US left has taken/is taking an established military definition and has repurposed it for a ideological agenda, in order to define a group of physical objects for legislative purposes. Sen. Diane Fienstein has (shades of Wendy, who no doubt supplied the list) defined a list of 158 firearms currently available to be prohibited, in new legislation to go before the H of R and the US Senate,(like was done in Canada – the list is similar). In law, semantics is everthing.

  29. yup, “assault” has an emotional impact in todays PC world
    I always considered the term to mean a military weapon that can lay down suppression fire, nothing else
    in the sandy hook shooting there was a busmaster in the trunk of the car that was filmed as it was removed long after the even

  31. If I bash somebody in the head with a rolled-up copy of the Chicago Tribune, maybe they’ll ban the paper as an “assault weapon”.

  32. An assault weapon is anything a person uses to assault another person.
    As Frank Zappa(R) said, “There is nothing more aggressive then one person sticking something into another person.”
    Since feminists have ascertained that all heterosexual conjugation is rape(sexual assault), in the future all penises(peni?) will be banned as assault weapons.

  34. All of the logical and factually correct discussion about assault rifles misses the point. Libtards have never been the least bit concerned about factual accuracy. For them it’s not about facts or truth, but rather always about feelings. They know how they feel about assault rifles, and so do all their friends on farcebook, and none of them want their preconceived notions confused with inconvenient facts. They are always right, we are always wrong.
    Attempting a logical discussion with a libtard is like trying to teach a pig to sing.
    Liberalism is a mental disorder.

  35. Johnny, your comment is correct, and it stands alone.
    I was going to comment yesterday, but I was curious to see how the thread would develop. This story, at a pretty fundamental level, is not just about the misrepresentation of so-called “assault weapons”, but about the mendacity of the media in talking about its misrepresentations, which your comment squarely hits right between the eyes.
    The subject article of the non-retraction pseudo-correction by the associate-editor was obviously poorly researched by the reporter, who made no detectable effort to understand even basic items: you need to correct the impression that a rifle with fixed bayonet is a spear? Really?
    The tone of the associate-editor’s comments is truly astounding: he/she seems to be saying that, “Hey, we understand that the article is a work in progess, and that what we’re doing is putting it out for peer review (among you, the public) so we can improve the product. Everyone’s cool with that approach, right?”
    Newspapers are not academic journals, and to try to construe them as such in the face of what was obviously a very bad day for the Chicago Tribune is truly risible. Whatever happened to, “Just the facts, ma’am”. And how about a real retraction and correction:
    “We regret and apologize for the disservice to our readership in publishing the article, which had numerous glaring factual errors, which were made clear to us by immediate feed-back from the community and which ought not to have escaped our news-gathering and analysis systems. As a result, the reporter in question is no longer employed with this organization. Further, we have undertaken a review of our editorial policies and procedures concerning the reporting of controversial and contested issues of public policy of this nature, and we will be updating and publishing a revised statement of policy shortly.”
    I was taught, in the earlier days of my life, that you could basically trust the newspaper — if it’s printed there, it must be true. Trust is everything in that business: I would have thought that the major newspaper in the community where the Tylenol poisonings occurred would have understood that. Apparently not, and the associate-editor just couldn’t resist that last little bit of uppity, could he/she?
    When is that asteroid going to show up, again?

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