I know I said I wasn’t going to write about politics anymore, that it was endangering my health, my sanity, and every breakable object in my home, but I’m bruised and hungover and irritable, and I just can’t let this one go past.
Every single time there’s a tragedy of the sort that just happened in Colorado, we get reporting like this:
The AR-15 assault rifle is a fearsome weapon, forged from aircraft-grade aluminum and as powerful as a Kandahar-bound M16. When Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes fired off as many as 50 shots a minute during his Friday-morning rampage, at least one bullet blasted all the way through the movie theater’s wall, hitting a victim on the other side. The AR-15 is also easy to shoot—“any idiot can do it,” a former border-patrol agent told CNN.
I’m honestly too irritated to pick apart the entire article, so I’m just going to speak to this first paragraph. First, I’ve got kitchen utensils that are “forged from aircraft-grade aluminum.” This is meaningless. Second, the fact that this looney’s semiautomatic AR-15 and the M16 fire the same bullet does not make them equally powerful. The rate of fire on the M16 is 3-5x higher than anyone could manage on a civilian AR-15. There are some simple tricks one can use to achieve pretty high rates of fire on just about any semiauto rifle, but they send accuracy straight to hell and still don’t approach the firing rate of the M16.
Third, the “50 rounds per minute” estimate is bullshit based on the amount of ammo he carried into the building with him, and also isn’t a particularly significant number. Try this test: get a stopwatch or a clock with a seconds hand and start counting out loud as fast as you can. Stop after one minute. That is about how many rounds (assuming you have a working index finger) you can get out of any semiautomatic weapon, barring an occasional reload. I played paintball at a bachelor party yesterday and achieved rates of fire higher than that with a toy meant for testosterone-laden weekend warriors.
Fourth, the fact that a bullet went through a wall doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. Gypsum and two-by-fours are not kevlar. A reasonably determined individual can put a ballpoint pen through an internal wall in any modern structure. Why is this pertinent?
Finally, modern firearms are just like cars. If you normally drive a Ford, when you go on a business trip and the car rental at the airport gives you a Toyota, do you shit yourself and spend an hour reading the owner’s manual? Of course not. Ignition’s here, wipers are there, e-brake is here, okay we’re good to go. Modern firearms are all going to have a safety, a magazine release, a charging handle or slide of some sort, and a trigger. Take five minutes to figure out how those four things work together on a given firearm and you can operate it without too much trouble. Pointing out that the AR-15 is easy to shoot is like pointing out that Ford and Toyota both put steering wheels in their cars.
What I’m getting at here is that sensationalist reporting about tragic events like this one don’t add anything. Alex Klein spewing gun control shibboleths is just as useless as Brian Ross fabricating a link between the shooter and the tea party. In the long run you just make yourself look like an ass and hurt your journalistic credibility with the better-informed.