Media Fail of the Day

From your classic “.9mm caliber” to every gun being a “GLOCK,” the media loves to show its ignorance of all things firearm. Sure, sometimes it’s an intentional lie to make those guns extra scary, but in this case I think we can chalk it up to a New York newswoman who likely knows less about guns than why Donald Trump won the presidency two nights ago. From this News 12 New York article:

NYPD: 20-year-old man found with machine gun in Bronx train station.
The NYPD says they arrested a 20-year-old man after he was found with a loaded semi-automatic firearm in the Kingsbridge subway station.
Yes, those two sentences appear back-to-back in the article. While the headline seems to have been edited to read “semi-automatic,” the article’s URL still says “machine gun.”

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5 thoughts on “Media Fail of the Day”

  1. The problem is that firearm terminology is far too complex for the mainstream media ro understand. Detail beyond ‘handgun’, ‘rifle’, and ‘bullet’ can be impossibly difficult for a commercial journalist to sort out and report on correctly. Firearm names should be simplified. For example, the Glock 21 Gen 4 could be called ‘The Deathalizer’ while the Glock 19 could be ‘Killerator’ and the Glock 43 could me the ‘Mini-Killerator’.

    Gun makers should adopt naming conventions that will capture the imagination of the mainstream journalidiots.

  2. Geoff "I'm getting too old for this shit" PR

    “The NYPD says they arrested a 20-year-old man after he was found with a loaded semi-automatic firearm…”

    *Snort*.

    Everybody knows it’s a fully semi-automatic firearm…

  3. The link to the article in this article, they changed it to read “NYPD: 20-year-old man found with semi-automatic firearm in Bronx train station” after getting called out on it.

  4. Several years ago, Charles Karwan wrote an article about a Colt single-action that went full automatic. I copied the article, but neither the magazine name nor the year is in it. The problem with the gun was that the firing pin bushing had fallen out, so the brass was shoved back on ignition. It hit the firing pin hard enough to cock the gun. If the finger were still on the trigger, it would keep firing until the cylinder was emptied or the shooter let up on the trigger. I love to see what a “journalist” would do if they saw that.