Monday’s broadcast of Morning Joe was entirely taken up by coverage of the previous night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed more than fifty and wounded hundreds more. However, even with a dearth of information about the killer and his weapons, only knowing for sure that they were capable of fully automatic fire, MSNBC still found time to speculate that a lack of gun control was at least partly responsible for the carnage.
Former ATF Special Agent in Charge and NBC/MSNBC law enforcement analyst Jim Cavanaugh was brought in early on to comment on the shooting throughout the morning. For the most part, Mika Brzezinski, her panelists, and guest reporters stuck to discussing the few aspects of the case that were known at that time. This did not include the precise type of weapon or weapons used by the killer, whether or not they were acquired legally, whether or not they were bought legally but then illegally modified to be fully automatic, what magazines or other feeding system the gun used, etcetera.
Nevertheless, about two hours into Morning Joe’s coverage, Sam Stein, Senior Politics Editor at the Huffington Post, decided that it was time to talk about gun control and asked Cavanaugh:
Hey, Jim, Jim, it’s Sam Stein. Uh, you talk about the pre-event behavior. What strikes me is just how little was actually done in the moment. I mean, this could have, there’s no apparent sophistication. He had the ability to do this because he was able to purchase these guns. There was [sic] no magazine capacity limits in the state. You could check into a hotel and not be seen with the guns ‘cause you could roll them in. If not for the incredible quickness of the SWAT teams on scene and the heroism of the medical units there, certainly this, it seems to me this could have been even worse than 50 plus dead, 200 plus injured. Can you talk about how easy this was, from the little we have, to pull off, putting aside the pre-planning?
Notice that, again, without knowing precisely what weapon was used, how it was configured, or whether or not it was legally owned or registered, Stein was already talking about a lack of magazine bans being a factor in the shooting and suggesting that the shooter was legally able to purchase the guns that were used.
It is also worth noting that Stein tried to characterize the planning for such a shooting as being easy, which set up Cavanaugh quite nicely to engage in the following speculation:
Right. Well, one of the overnight anchors had asked me, you know, how much ammunition can you buy in Nevada? Well, how much money do you have and how big is your truck? That's how much ammunition you can buy. You can buy all you want. And you can get, how much can you get into a hotel room. Well, you can get in there with a wheeled suitcase. And so, you’re right Sam. If he had gone up there probably with more ammunition, we don't know. He, there may still be a cache of ammunition in the room that he didn't fire because of Las Vegas SWAT and their patrol officers who located him for SWAT and the witnesses who located him for SWAT, which was critical. But there could still be a lot of ammo there that he could have dragged in in a couple of wheeled suitcases, barricaded that door and planned to stay, you know, until he was killed.
What Cavanaugh appeared to be setting up here was a call for legal limits on the purchase of ammunition, which have been passed or proposed as a form of gun control relatively recently by lawmakers in both California and New York.
Cavanaugh continued and somewhat bizarrely claimed that fully automatic weapons are easy to obtain:
And so, yes, it's devastating. I mean, these weapons are easy to get. Even a converted machine gun is not that hard to get on a street. I mean, in ATF we bought those. Our undercover agents bought those quite a bit. We always targeted them. We tried to get the places where they were being made, at machine shops, at illegal, you know, operations making those, selling them for profit or selling them in the criminal underworld. I mean, that was the daily business of ATF. We were always trying to stop those machine guns. It didn't make giant headlines when we caught a guy with three or four illegal machine guns. But we always felt like, you know, this is stopping the next murder. And we tried to get those off the street and the police do that as well. But you just don't get everyone, there’s so many of ‘em out there. And, uh, people can convert ‘em, they can buy ‘em when they're already converted. Or this could be a gun that was originally a machine gun. Like an M-16. A military rifle. Or it could even be a bump-stock gun. Which is another anomaly in the firearms world. But, it's just possible it's that. But, it, more than likely it's just a submachine gun.
Cavanaugh’s claim that “these weapons are easy to get,” referring to machine guns, was misleading at best. Legal machine guns are both heavily regulated and extremely expensive and cannot simply be bought by anyone walking into a normal gun store. Moreover, while illegal machine guns may be relatively easy to acquire if you are in the ATF and have nationwide intelligence on and thereby access to the criminals who manufacture them, for normal people, these types of weapons are entirely inaccessible and quite dangerous to even attempt purchasing.
MSNBC’s scare-mongering about machine guns flooding American streets has been bad enough in their pro-gun control editorializing, but it was especially unhelpful to include such misinformation during supposedly hard news reporting in the immediate aftermath of such a heinous mass shooting.
See the full transcript below:
7:54 AM EST
(...)
SAM STEIN [HUFFINGTON POST, SENIOR POLITICS EDITOR]: Hey, Jim, Jim, it’s Sam Stein. Uh, you talk about the pre-event behavior. What strikes me is just how little was actually done in the moment. I mean, this could have,-
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: [talking under Stein] How could they have done something like-
STEIN: -there’s no apparent sophistication. He had the ability to do this because he was able to purchase these guns. There was [sic] no magazine capacity limits in the state. You could check into a hotel and not be seen with the guns ‘cause you could roll them in. If not for the incredible quickness of the SWAT teams on scene and the heroism of the medical units there, certainly this, it seems to me this could have been even worse than 50 plus dead, 200 plus injured. Can you talk about how easy this was, from the little we have, to pull off, putting aside the pre-planning?
JIM CAVANAUGH [NBC/MSNBC, ANALYST; ATF, FORMER SPECIAL AGENT IN CHARGE]: Right. Well, one of the overnight anchors had asked me, you know, how much ammunition can you buy in Nevada? Well, how much money do you have and how big is your truck? That's how much ammunition you can buy. You can buy all you want. And you can get, how much can you get into a hotel room. Well, you can get in there with a wheeled suitcase. And so, you’re right Sam. If he had gone up there probably with more ammunition, we don't know. He, there may still be a cache of ammunition in the room that he didn't fire because of Las Vegas SWAT and their patrol officers who located him for SWAT and the witnesses who located him for SWAT, which was critical. But there could still be a lot of ammo there that he could have dragged in in a couple of wheeled suitcases, barricaded that door and planned to stay, you know, until he was killed. And so, yes, it's devastating. I mean, these weapons are easy to get. Even a converted machine gun is not that hard to get on a street. I mean, in ATF we bought those. Our undercover agents bought those quite a bit. We always targeted them. We tried to get the places where they were being made, at machine shops, at illegal, you know, operations making those, selling them for profit or selling them in the criminal underworld. I mean, that was the daily business of ATF. We were always trying to stop those machine guns. It didn't make giant headlines when we caught a guy with three or four illegal machine guns. But we always felt like, you know, this is stopping the next murder. And we tried to get those off the street and the police do that as well. But you just don't get everyone, there’s so many of ‘em out there. And, uh, people can convert ‘em, they can buy ‘em when they're already converted. Or this could be a gun that was originally a machine gun. Like an M-16. A military rifle. Or it could even be a bump-stock gun. Which is another anomaly in the firearms world. But, it's just possible it's that. But, it, more than likely it's just a submachine gun.
(...)
