Years ago, when the gun violence debate wasn’t a constant fixture in the weekly news cycle, it was possible to excuse or forgive journalists’ general illiteracy regarding firearms.
But after several recent and fiercely discussed mass shooting events in the U.S., after all these innocent people have been cut down by deranged gunmen, what’s the excuse for it?
At this point, there’s no reason, no decent justification, for why anyone writing about the subject should still to be so damned ignorant about the most basic and fundamental details regarding firearms and U.S. gun laws.
Yet here we are.
Take, for example, the New Yorker’s bizarre love letter, titled “Joan of Arc and the Passion of Emma Gonzalez,” to Parkland teen Emma Gonzalez.
The comparisons and imagery deployed by author Rebecca Mead are silly enough on their own, but it gets much worse. The most annoying part is exactly one sentence into the story, when Mead refers to the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in the Parkland slayings as a “semiautomatic machine gun.”
No, no, no.
The shooter, Nicholas Cruz, used a semi-automatic rifle, which is definitely not the same thing as a machine gun. Machine guns, which fire multiple bullets at one pull of the trigger, are illegal to own without a special and extremely rare federal license.
The New Yorker, which has since corrected the mistake, isn’t some low-budget blog. They have fact-checkers! But even worse, correcting a glaring error doesn’t fix the fact that someone so completely ignorant about the basics of firearms and the law would write an entire piece about calls for increased gun control measures. Why should anyone keep reading, given the author’s general ignorance likely formed the ideas and views contained in this superficially corrected piece? And for that matter, how does a professional member of national media manage to get this deep into the Parkland shooting conversation without absorbing even the most basic details about the weapons used or the laws governing them?
At what point does the ignorance become willful?
The country would benefit greatly from a robust and good-faith debate on the merits of the pro- and anti-gun control arguments. But it’s going to be difficult to get there when so many public voices simply refuse to learn about the topic being debated. The ignorance, in the wrong hands, becomes a tool. The reason proponents of gun rights are always touchy about fake explanations and incorrect descriptions of guns is that somehow the mistakes (such as the idea that people can own machine guns or the false assertion that it takes just seconds for anyone to buy a gun or that background checks aren’t required at gun shows) always skew one way; the errors are repeatedly presented as fact, and then as evidence that more gun control laws are needed.
There’s really no excuse anymore for journalists not to know something about the tool at the center of the gun violence debate. You owe your readers that much.
Finally, as to all the other points in Mead’s article: Sinead O’Connor did it first.
