Indulge me in a little board topic abuse if you will...

Strictly speaking this doesn't have anything to do with the movies, but it IS a media related topic, and it's about guns, and I love action movies above all things, so if you absolutely MUST have a Hollywood connection in all of your KILL HIM! posts, hopefully those will tide you over.

I think the big wire services ought to start hiring crime reporters who know something about guns, because this article is a bit of a disaster... full of scary words like "spraying bullets" and "AK-47", but nearly empty of actual helpful information.

First of all, the article goes back to the old assault weapns ban canard...


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Another issue potentially at play is the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, 10 years after its passage. The legislation outlawed 19 types of guns, including the semiautomatic AK-47.
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That last sentence is absolutely false. It did not outlaw the semi-automatic AK-47... the fully automatic AK-47 was illegal before the ban, and remains illegal now that the ban has been lifted. I must have typed these words a million times on this board but the assault weapons ban made illegal certain types of attachments that could be ADDED to weapons like the CIVILIAN version of the AK-47, which were always LEGAL to purchase, even DURING the ban. Again those are bayonet lugs, fire supressors, folding stocks, xtra large magazines, and grenade launchers.

But again, the author SHOULD know that, and if he's going to accuse the lifting of the Assault Weapons ban, then he HAS to provide evidence that one or more of those previously banned attachments are THE thing that is increasing the lethality of these weapons. Has he done that? No. In fact, he doesn't even seem to be aware of the reality of what the ban actually DID.

Also, There is a very important piece of information that he is leaving out of this piece that could tell us almost definitively whether or not the lifting of the AWB is to blame here.

I'll give you a second to try and figure out what that might be...
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That's right, we need to know if the Assault Weapons they are seeing on the streets are AUTOMATIC or not. Again, fully automatic weapons have ALWAYS BEEN ILLEGAL, both before, during, and after the ban, and they continue to be illegal now. Are we seeing these AUTOMATIC weapons on the streets now more than ever, or not? This is a crucial point. But not only does the article not answer the question but in several cases they use wording that further obscures the issue.


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The spray of bullets that killed a police officer and hurt three others this week came from something increasingly common on this city's streets: a high-powered assault weapon
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if you just spray the general vicinity you're going to get innocent bystanders
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These quotes suggest that what we are seeing on the streets of Miami are Automatic Weapons that can put out a spray of gunfire with one pull of the trigger. A reporter writing a story about guns ought to know this but I'll say it again... if I shoot a semi-automatic "assault rifle" as fast as I can, meaning I have to pull the trigger once every time I want the gun to fire, and you fire a semi-automatic handgun as fast as you can, the rate of fire will be NO DIFFERENT. So are we REALLY seeing bullets being "sprayed" or is this a euphemism being used for political effect?

If these criminals who are "spraying bullets" are firing automatic weapons, then that sentence makes sense. If not, then they are not "spraying bullets" any more, or more dangerously, than similar criminal firing a handgun, and therefore it doesn't really matter WHAT kind of gun they are using to commit these crimes... in which case you'd want to know why they wrote the piece in the first place.

If, on the other hand, they are firing automatic weapons, then we have a different problem altogether... but more importantly, it's a problem that CANNOT be solved simply by re-instating the Assault Weapons Ban (which did not need to address automatic weapons because they were already illegal), and mentioning the AWB in the article has been done for shock/political effect in a callously calculated way.

Or, put another way, is this just honest bad reporting, or does this guy have an agenda/bias?

The really sad thing is that it occurs to me that what's most unfortunate about this mediocre reporting effort is that at the heart of this issue is a really interesting story. We know that two big reasons why gangs and criminals tend not to use assault style weapons is that 1) they tend to be very expensive, while a decent handgun can often be had for 1/4 of the price. And 2) because gangs in parrticular want something they can carry and assault-style weapons are very difficult to conceal.

So if Miami has suddenly been flooded by Semi-automatic assault-style weapons, then I'd want to know what has changed. The reporter might want to look into the possibility that someone, perhaps Mexican drug gangs running them across our porous border, has been flooding the market with cheap models... or maybe the local police departments are so outnumbered and overwhelmed that they have decided to abandon gang interdiction altogether and the criminals no longer are worried about being seen on the street with a rifle.

Either question might have resulted in a useful and interesting story... but I guess that's too much to expect fromt he modern-day investigative journalist.