The ignorant and guns

In the aftermath of the Aurora shooting atrocity, committed by a geeky graduate student named James Holmes, a lot of dumb things were uttered by otherwise intelligent people. President Obama, acknowledging sensitivity on the gun issue, said he nonetheless believes that “even gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals.”

Mr. Obama, who once called Navy corpsmen “corpsemen,” note that U.S. soldiers don’t carry AK-47s, but rather M-4s. And no one, except the criminals themselves, wants firearms in the hands of lawbreakers. (The shooter used a Remington Model 870 pump-action shotgun, an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in .223 Rem. caliber, and a 40 mm. Glock semi-automatic pistol — not an AK-47!)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called for more stringent gun control laws, ignoring the fact that it is almost impossible to legally own a handgun in New York City, yet hundreds of murders each year are committed in that city. Bloomberg, who travels with armed bodyguards, denies common New Yorkers the right to defend themselves.

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D) Calif., fretted about large capacity magazines and “assault weapons.” (Somehow the 62-year-old Model 870 Remington shotgun is now regarded by Feinstein and others as an “assault weapon.”)

One news outlet erroneously called the shotgun an “870 Winchester.”

ABC’s Brian Ross and George Stephanopoulos intimated that the shooter was a member of the Tea Party. Hours later they retracted their claim.

Bill Moyers, the left-wing commentator for PBS scowled and said, “NRA — the enabler of death.”

Bill O’Reilly coined his own phrase in describing the firearms used in the shooting — he called them “heavy armament.” (Actually, they are regarded as “small arms” in military parlance. The .223 isn’t powerful enough to be a decent deer rifle.) Then O’Reilly went on a tirade, saying we shouldn’t be able to buy “bazookas, machineguns and howitzers.” He ranted about AK-47s, even though the rifle used in the killings at Aurora was an AR-15.

News flash: NO ONE CAN BUY BAZOOKAS, MACHINEGUNS OR HOWITZERS IN GUN STORES OR AT GUN SHOWS, AND NONE WAS USED IN THE SHOOTINGS!

Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne wrote that we need to “ban automatic weapons,” ignoring the fact fully-automatic weapons already are illegal. As usual, reporters, columnists and other pundits who know absolutely nothing about firearms revealed their ignorance, confusing semi-automatic firearms with fully automatic weapons.

Our “sons and daughters of Chicago” — Obama, Jesse Jackson, and Jackson’s daughter all clamored for more “gun control.” Chicago, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, already has had 300 murders just in 2012. So how’s that working out?

As with the Arizona shooting a couple years ago, the media were desperate to pin the shooting on a conservative, but they just couldn’t pull it off. It reminded me of the D.C. sniper case, where the female head of the Baltimore Police Department told the media, “The shooter probably has Guns and Ammo magazine in his bathroom.” Well, surprise, surprise — the “shooter” in that case turned out to be two black guys, one a Muslim and homosexual. It didn’t fit the media’s narrative of the right-wing “bubba” — NRA member, gun collector, hunter, and military veteran.

There wasn’t much discussion about the Aurora theater being a “gun-free zone.” The theater had a number of military personnel and veterans in attendance, but they were unarmed. Thus, everyone in the theater was a sitting duck. “Gun-free zones” are target-rich environments. Remember Virginia-Tech?

Dave Petzal from FIELD & STREAM had one of the more sensible comments on his blog: “After World War II, we were awash in military weapons. Yet Aurora and Columbine and Virginia Tech are all very recent. What changed? ... We seem to have finally succeeded in creating young men with no regard for human life. Probably there are legions of them, but only one is too many. Their numbers cut across lines of race, education and class. They shoot people, friends or strangers, singly or en masse, as casually as they slaughter in video games … maybe the news media should stop feasting on these horrors as vultures do on a carcass. Maybe it’s part of a general breakdown in society.”

Amid the senseless clamor, Petzal made the most sense.

Bernie Kuntz, a Jamestown native, has been an Outdoors columnist for the Sun since 1974

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