Misconceptions of an Anti-Gun Youth

Linoge has a great post about how the Brady Campaign picks meaningless metrics to make their failed agendas look far more successful than they really are. This lead me to think about my thoughts back when I was anti gun. As I said on BB&Guns I grew up in an area with virtually no gun culture, so my knowledge of guns was limeted to Hollywood, and the Main Stream Media, which in the early 90s was essentially a mouthpiece for the Brady Campaign.

First up, thanks to the hard work of the Brady Campaign and the Joyce Foundation I bought the line that “Assault Weapons” were in-fact “Machine Guns”. This also fit very well into my idea that anybody could walk into a gun shop anywhere in the country and walk out with a full-auto military weapon.

Classic Hollywood scene, and total bullshit. First up when you see The T-800 doing its thing he’s shooting full-auto. The IMFDB page cites Cameron saying some noise about the Terminator modifying the guns to full auto, which sounds a little goofy. I guess you could argue he’s an advanced machine from the future…so why didn’t he just mill a gun himself?

Still, that Uzi he gets? Totally an NFA Short Barreled rifle, even if it is in semi-auto.

Also in Movies and video games, its not like they EVER give a character a semi-auto version of a gun that exists in full-auto. This is the same reason why women in films are either very fit and good looking, or ugly. Hollywood is about excess and fantasy, so there is no value in going off half-cocked. Also video games are all about escapism, so just like the latest Need for Speed won’t include the baseline V6 Mustang that is affordable and good on gas mileage, or the Ford Fusion which is one of the best selling cars in America. People don’t want to drive the car they drive to work in a video game, they want the Cobra GT500 Mustang that costs more than they could ever afford and eats copious amounts of Premium gas! Same reason why you’ll never see a FPS where the shooter gets a Colt AR-15 sporter rifle, or an Uzi Carbine with a 16 barrel.

Another confusing point for me was what was all this “Semi-auto” vs. “Full-auto”. After hearing one of the talking-head discussions on the news, the NRA rep cleared things up for me that “Full-Auto” was what machine guns did, but still what was the “semi” part? I asked my Dad…he had NO idea. I had just recently watched Robocop:

In this film Robocop uses an “Auto-Nine” pistol, which is in fact a modified Beretta 93R Sub-Machinegun that fires 3-round bursts. “Burstfire” is a term I only recently learned, and isn’t often spoken about in general gunnie talk, and often only in deep technical G33kery, so I assumed if Full-auto would fire until the trigger was released, shooting a short burst with each trigger pull must be “Semi-Auto”. I’m not alone in this misconception, as my 17 year-old Nephew expressed the same assumption to me when talking guns this summer.

Another HUGE assumption I made was the power level of guns. Again, given that I was a teen in the early 90s most of my gun knowledge was around the pending “Assault Weapon Ban” that graced the news nearly nightly. There would be somebody advocating that their gun that was proposed to be banned was their hunting and sporting gun. It was always interesting that the gun owner was usually wearing camouflage, bearded, and either overweight, or RAIL thin. And as far as my memory goes the rail thin guy ALWAYS had a pony tail. On the other side of the split-screen was the gun control advocate, who was wearing a suit and tie, and generally had a mahogany bookcase behind him.

I got the impression that the rounds fired by these guns (.223 Remington, and 7.62x39mm) were VERY powerful, and certainly unreasonable compared to the common “Sporting Rounds” that I’d hear Maine deer hunters talk about, like .30-06 Springfield .308 Winchester or 12 gauge shotgun. Also there’s the whole .45 ACP vs. 9x19mm nonsense.

And of course there’s the whole “Private citizens rarely use guns in self Defense”, and you are 5,280x more likely to shoot a family member than an attacker, stuff.

As I’ve said before after I shot my first gun, I wanted to buy one, but being a college student didn’t have ANY disposable income, so being a geek I READ about guns. Here’s some of the important things I learned.

-I learned what the NFA was, and what it took to buy the various guns classified as NFA. I also learned what somebody actually NEEDS to do to buy a gun in a shop everywhere in this nation.

-I learned what Semi-auto means. Its a simple concept, but without that you can really be lead by the nose.

– I learned how stupid the Assault Weapons Ban really was:

I could geek out on the stupidity of this ban, but this video says it all.

-I learned about ballistics. Just the basic concept of bullet weight and muzzle velocity goes a LONG way in comparing various guns with power. Of course the rabbit hole of ballistics (internal, external, and terminal, as well as things like bullet construction, rate of spin) goes very deep, but simply knowing that a .223 Remington commonly has a 55 Grain bullet that goes around 3,000 FPS, generating about 1,300 Ft/lbs of muzzle energy, while a 150 grain .308 Winchester bullet is going almost that fast, but runs about 2,500 ft/lbs of energy, you can get an idea that if somebody shoot a deer with an AR-15 in .223 Rem, vs a Winchester Model 70 in .308, one might worry that the .223 is UNDER-powered, not the other way around.

-And of course there is work by Professor Gary Kleck as well as looking at FBI crime data quickly lead me to believe that not only are defensive guns used quite often, but that they are often rarely shot in the altercations. This of course suddenly makes people with carry permits look a LOT less paranoid than the anti-gun me has assumed.

I’ll finally end on a quote which sums up the anti-gun side to a T!

“Assault weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons –anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun– can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

-Josh Sugarmann of the Violence Policy Center

Or better put, their stance is not based in fact or logic, but emotion supported by lies.