Rolling Stone just proved that you don’t need to know anything about firearms in order to blog an attack on them.
On July 14, Rolling Stone magazine released a “specific look at the weapons criminals prefer,” which they called the “5 Most Dangerous Guns in America.” Of course, they proved that they know next to nothing about the gun industry by lumping together almost every type of firearm into a quick list.
For Rolling Stone, the most dangerous guns included almost every type of gun, except liberals’ favorite target: semi-automatic rifles. They were chosen based on “availability, portability and criminal usage.”
Blogger Kristen Gwynne’s entire method left much to be desired. She examined Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm (ATF) records of which guns were retrieved from “crime scenes in 2012.” Gwynne then took the most common categories of guns and declared those the most dangerous. This method completely ignored the popularity of different firearms.
Apparently, Gwynne emerged from the radical fringe at AlterNet.com just to tell the world how little she knew about firearms. This is quite a change from her previous efforts to downplay the dangers of crack cocaine or attack efforts to stamp out methamphetamine production.
In her article, Gwynne did not say which specific guns were dangerous. Instead she listed the categories of guns that were most dangerous, such as the No. 1 most dangerous gun: pistols.
No, not Glocks, or Sig Sauers, or any specific type of firearm, just all pistols. Her only specific distinction was to separate handguns into pistols and revolvers. Revolvers were Gwynne’s second choice.
Derringers were number five on the list, begging the question: does anyone use derringers anymore? Other than perhaps riverboat gamblers who kept them in their hat.
Gwynne also listed rifles as the fourth most dangerous type of gun, and lashed out at hunting rifles. She never really defined hunting rifles, except that they are “designed to be fired from the shoulder” and are not “muskets.” But the picture was of an AR-15 Bushmaster even though she wasn’t criticizing semi-automatic weapons.
The picture was of the same rifle used to murder school children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. However she admitted, in her very last sentence, that “assault weapons … are used in a small minority of homicides and other gun crimes.”
Even shotguns ranked fourth on her list. This must be unfortunate news to those who took Vice President Joe Biden’s advice in February 2013 to “Buy a shotgun! Buy a shotgun!”
