A leftist Washington Post contributor played loose with the facts on guns in her attempt to convince readers to support banning “assault-style weapons.”
Kaiser Health News Editor-in-Chief Elisabeth Rosenthal’s latest anti-gun op-ed was headlined, “I was a teenage gun owner, then an ER doctor. Assault-style weapons make me sick.” She pivoted off her childhood rifling hobby and her experience as an emergency room doctor to gripe: “I gave up riflery as a teenager when other options — boys, movies, travel — came along. Maybe I’ll take it up again someday, if assault-style weaponry is banned and the word ‘gun’ again brings to mind sport and not a spinoff of war.” Rosenthal must have missed that gun experts have stated that there’s no such thing as a so-called “assault weapon.”
She panned how Congress failed to reauthorize the 1994 “assault weapons ban”: “Today, 17 years after Congress failed to reauthorize the ban, Americans own about 20 million AR-15-style rifles or similar weapons.” [Emphasis added.]
Rosenthal tried to make guns appear as if they’ve evolved into war machines rather than tools for sport: “Guns used to be on a continuum with bows and arrows; now they seem better lumped in with grenades, mortars and bombs.” She then exploited the shooting massacre in Boulder, Colorado to fear-monger how “the adrenaline in today’s gun culture clearly lies in paramilitary posturing, signaling to the world the ability to bring mayhem and destruction.”
Rosenthal’s experience with guns has proven to be about as useless as her op-ed. Statista released research Feb. 2 showing that the top weapon used in homicides in 2019 alone was handguns, by a massive margin. Of the “13,927 total homicide victims recorded by the FBI in 2019,” handguns alone were responsible for 46 percent (6,368) of that figure. Homicide by rifles, by contrast, only accounted for three percent (364) of the cases.
A February 2020 Drexel University Law Review article conceded the following points on “assault weapons,” which completely upended Rosenthal’s propaganda:
Firearms manufacturers do not sell ‘assault weapons.’ When a buyer searches for what the majority of the public would understand to be an ‘assault weapon,” he or she will search ‘rifles’ categorized as ‘hunting,’ ‘tactical,’ ‘competition,’ or ‘sporting.’ This further evidences the artificial nature of the term ‘assault weapon.’ Law makers have been left to create a category of gun in accordance with their political mission.
Rosenthal has a history of pushing leftist policies. She recently downplayed the effects COVID lockdowns have on children by praising — wait for it — China’s SARS lockdown:
With 20-20 hindsight, I can provide some reassurance, because my kids were 8 and 10 when SARS hit Beijing nearly two decades ago, shutting down the city for months: Your children will likely be fine, and maybe even better as human beings, for having lived through this tragic experience.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Washington Post at 202-334-6000 and tell it to stop publishing absurd anti-gun propaganda.
