Last week, Second Amendment allies were outraged about the distorted editing of Katie Couric’s “documentary” on gun violence. It was revealed that a critical exchange between anti-gun parrot Couric and the Virginia Citizens Defense League was edited to make the gun rights activists appear speechless in response to one of Couric’s “gotcha” questions.
Now another such “editing” situation has come to light.
Over at The Federalist, Jim Sullivan, who helped design the AR15 rifle and other popular firearms, explains how “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” edited his interview. The episode is titled “AR15: Modern Sporting Rifle” and will reveal “how America’s gun industry has marketed its deadliest product.”
“I’m talking about a gun now known as the AR-15, a weapon designed for wartime, but one that has somehow morphed into one of the most popular pieces of so-called sports equipment,” Gumbel says in his intro. “Under that guise, millions of AR-15s have been sold in recent years, primarily for people who claim to want them to hunt or compete in target shooting. But AR-15s have also played an ugly role in the mass shootings that have become all too commonplace throughout this country.”
“Claim” they want to target shoot? Target shooting is an Olympic sport, Bryant.
“They didn’t lie about what I said, they just omitted key parts, which changed the meaning,” says Sullivan.
Sullivan elaborates: “1) When I appear to say that the civilian-model AR-15 is just as effective or deadly as the military M16, they omitted that I had said ‘When firing semi-auto only’ and that ‘the select fire M16 on full auto is of course more effective.'”
This isn’t really a surprise since the gun-ignorant media probably doesn’t understand the difference between a “semi-automatic” rifle and an “automatic” rifle. And if they do, it’s in their interest to propagate the lie that semi-automatic rifles can spray bullets like a fully automatic machine gun. Scary! Ban them!
Just for the record, a semi-automatic rifle will fire a single bullet when the trigger is pulled. With an fully automatic rifle, the gun will fire bullets as long as the trigger is pulled back. Fully automatic weapons are very hard to come by and are highly regulated by the ATF. They are also extraordinarily expensive.
Sullivan continues: “2) the interviewer pretended not to understand the relevance that, due to the Hague Convention, military bullets cannot be expanding hollow points like hunting bullets that give up all of their energy in the target body instead of passing through with minimum wound effect, with most of the energy still in the bullet and wasted. That doesn’t mean I’m not pleased to see AR-15s sell on the civilian market. It just means I didn’t realize they would 57 years ago. And I’m not on the wrong side of any gun issue unless someone wants to argue that an infantry rifle cartridge should kill a cavalry horse at 1,000 yards (30-06 criteria).”
Here’s an account of the interview that was promoted to media outlets.
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