A recent story on WRAL in Raleigh caught my attention. The headline said "Assault Weapons." So I expected to see a story about some terrorist armed with a machine gun cranking off hundreds of rounds like the North Hollywood Shootout. Instead, what I found was a common mistake among reporters: mislabeling a semiautomatic rifle as an automatic.
While it may seem to be as trivial as comparing a Corvette with a Corvair (after all, they’re both cars), there is a difference between a real assault weapon and the civilian version. During the Clinton Administration, technology that was well over 75 years old was banned, not for the weapon’s cababilites but for their looks.
WRAL reporter Beau Minick needs some education with regards to firearms. The video footage of the story was shot in the evidence room of the Franklin County Sheriff’s office and showed several rifles that were purported to be the dreaded "assault weapon." The reality is 3 of those shown were russian SKS rifles that were designed during World War II and are comparible to the American M-1 Garand rifle that GI’s used in every theater of the war. It never was automatic and was originally designed with a 10 round magazine. It fires one round for every pull of the trigger and is not a machine gun and, as such, is not useful for modern military (i.e. assault) uses.
The Sheriff’s office also displayed an AK-47 type rifle. Here again, more explanation is required. While the original AK-47 was designed way back in 1947 as an automatic assault rifle, the civilain version has alway been a single round weapon. In fact, machine guns have been tightly regulated in the US since 1934.
Reporters need to learn the difference between what a gun does and what it looks like. By carelessly throwing around the term "assault weapon," the media mislead the easily mislead public into thinking any average citizen can waltz down to his gun store and by a machine gun.
But, Jeff, they LOOK so scary!
See what the late Col. Jeff Cooper has to say on the matter:
My dictionary describes an obsession as “a haunting by a fixed idea.” A
haunting is a nagging, continuous fear of the
unreal. A fixed idea is one that cannot be altered, by truth or reason
or anything else.
Phobia is listed as “fear, horror, or aversion — of a morbid character.
“Morbid” is “unwholesome, sickly. ”
Those of us who shoot cannot help being perplexed when we encounter
people who are apparently haunted by a fixed
and morbid aversion to our guns. When first we meet such persons we
generally respond with explanations, as is only
reasonable. But with time we discover that often we are not dealing with
rational minds. This is not to say that everyone
who is opposed to shooting is mentally aberrant, but it is to say that
those who latch on to an unreasonable notion and
thereafter refuse to listen to any further discussion of it have
problems that are more amenable to psychiatry than to
argument.
I coined the term hoplophobia over twenty years ago, not out of
pretension but in the sincere belief that we should
recognize a very peculiar sociological attitude for what it is — a more
or less hysterical neurosis rather than a legitimate
political position. It follows convention in the use of Greek roots in
describing specific mental afflictions. “Hoplon” is the
Greek word for “instrument,” but refers synonymously to “weapon” since
the earliest and principal instruments were
weapons. Phobos is Greek for “terror” and medically denotes unreasoning
panic rather than normal fear. Thus
hoplophobia is a mental disturbance characterized by irrational aversion
to weapons, as opposed to justified
apprehension about those who may wield them. The word has not become
common, though twenty years is perhaps too
short a time in which to test it, but I am nevertheless convinced that
it has merit. We read of “gun grabbers” and “anti-gun
nuts” but these slang terms do not face up to the reasons why such
people behave the way they do. They do not
adequately suggest that reason, logic, and truth can have no effect upon
one who if irrational on the point under
discussion. You cannot say calmly “Come, let us reason together” to a
hoplophobe because that is what he is — a
hoplophobe. He is not just one who holds an opposing view, he is an
obsessive neurotic. You can speak, write, and
illustrate the merits of the case until you drop dead, and no matter how
good you are his mind will not be changed. A
victim of hydrophobia will die, horribly, rather than accept the water
his body desperately needs. A victim of hoplophobia
will die, probably, before he will accept the fallacy of his emotional
fixation for what it is.
Have you noted that whenever an assassination is committed with a rifle,
our journalistic hoplophobes clamor for further
prohibitions on pistols? A pistol is a defensive weapon; a rifle is an
offensive weapon. Yet the hoplophobes always attack
pistols first because they f! eel that pistols are somehow nastier than
rifles. (Though rifles are pretty nasty, too. They will
get to those later.) This is the age of the “gut reaction” -that crutch
of intellectual cripples — and for an interesting number
of commentators it is not even embarrassing to admit that actually
thinking about anything important is just too much
trouble. Some of our most ubiquitous and highly paid social-problem
columnists are egregious examples of this.
Not long ago a staff member of the Chicago Tribune held forth at some
length about how the color gatefolds in outdoor
magazines exemplified the same sniggering depravity that we find in the
pornographic press, substituting guns for girls.
What a sewer of a mind this man displays! It is undeniable that both a
man-made work of art and a beautiful woman are
manifestations of God’s blessing, but to imply that our admiration for
them is obscene is to give oneself away. For some it
indeed may be, but the rest of us need no advice from such. (I had
thought that the fad to fantasize everything into a
Freudian sex-symbol had gone out of vogue prior to World War II, but
obviously there are a good many who never got
the word.)
The essence of the affliction is the belief that instruments cause acts.
It may be that certain degenerate human beings are
so far gone that they will use something just because it is there — a
match, for instance. (I saw a bumper sticker in the
Rockies that admonished “Prevent Forest Fires. Register Matches!”) One
who will burn people because he has a match
is the same as one who will shoot people because he has a gun, but the
hoplophobe zeroes in on guns because he is —
let’s face it — irrational. He will answer this by saying that we need
matches (and cars, and motorcycles, and power saws,
et cetera) but we do not need guns. He will not accept the idea that you
may indeed need your guns, because he hates
guns. He is afflicted by the grotesque notion that tools have a will of
their own. He may admit that safe driving is a
matter of individual responsibility, but he rejects the parallel in the
matter of weapons. This may not be insanity, but it is
clearly related to it.
One cannot rationally hate or fear an inanimate object. Neither can he
rationally hate or fear an object because of its
designed purpose. Whether one approves of capital punishment or not, one
cannot rationally fear a hemp rope. One who
did, possibly because he once narrowly escaped hanging, would generally
be referred to a shrink. When the most
prominent hoplophobe in the United States Senate says that he abhors
firearms because their purpose is to put bullets
through things, he reinforces the impressions that many have formed
about his capacity to reason.
My point — and I hope it is clear — is that hoplophobia is a mental
disturbance rather than a point of view. Differences of
opinion — on economic policy, or forced integration, or the morality of
! abortion, or the neutron bomb — these we may
hope to resolve by discussion. But we cannot so resolve a phobia. The
mentally ill we cannot reach. But we can identify a
form of mental illness for what it is, and so separate its victims from
the policy considerations of reasonable people.
The root of the evil is the unprincipled attempt to gain votes by
appealing to the emotions of the emotionally disturbed.
Few reasonable politicians dare to take on the Second Amendment, even in
the Eastern Megalopolis. (One prominent
left-liberal told a New Yorker interviewer that he “would rather be a
deer, in season, than to take on ‘the gun lobby’!”)
But if, as is the case with the aforementioned senator, the politician
is already a hopeless hoplophobe, his advisers must
turn him loose to appeal to his constituency of crazies, since their
jobs depend on it. “Go to it, Senator! The nuts are all
with you.”
This is something we who prize our traditional liberties must face.
Convincing the uninterested is the very essence of
politics, in a two-party system. It is up to us to do that by
demonstrating that hoplophobia is a disease, and to call upon
all reasonable people to reject it as a basis for the formulation of
policy.
the second amendment lets us any type of weapon to be free as for the socalled aks they are a way and means to be used to keep us free against tyranny they are not bad except those who want to be slaves to a tyrant or a dictator like hitler ,stalin , mao and others disarmed their citizens and killed them so if you want to be without a weapon so be it but you will be a slave or just dead so now then who is the enemy me who wants to be free or the man who comes in a has gun and takes your shit and you are dead which is it life or death to be free