Rolling Stone magazine is trying to dig itself out of obscurity by pushing the gun control agenda pretty hard. They published a softball interview with Michael Bloomberg, launched a slick “guns are bad” website with some laughably researched information, and also published an article detailing “The 5 Most Dangerous Guns in America.” There’s just one problem: Rolling Stone has apparently never picked up a dictionary, and knows less about guns than Michael Bloomberg knows about tanks. From the article . . .
Popular among handgun-owners, pistols are defined by their built-in barrel and short stock. They are the most commonly recovered firearm type reported by the ATF. With more than 119,000 pistols found at crime scenes in 2012, this handgun model holds an unfortunately solid first place in criminal weaponry.
So, issues.
First things first, the article doesn’t list specific firearms — they basically just rattle off the major “types” of guns. Pistols! Revolvers! Rifles! Shotguns! Derringers! Not specific firearms, but entire classes of firearms. That’s like saying the most dangerous person in the United States is men. In other words, the article has exactly zero content and doesn’t even provide the information trumpeted in the title. It seems like the entire point of the article was as a vehicle to further the anti-gun agenda of the publication by pointing out “OMG! Criminals use guns to kill people! This is terrible!”
As for the content itself, I think they mean “semi-automatic handguns,” not necessarily “pistols.” Apparently Wikipedia thinks that a pistol is any handgun with an integral barrel and chamber, differentiating them from revolvers which have a stationary barrel and revolving chamber. We tend to use the terms pistol and handgun interchangeably, but even if Rolling Stone were using the term properly they got the definition completely wrong.
“Pistols are defined by their built-in barrel and short stock.” Uh, no, they’re not. Pistols, by definition, do not have a stock since they are designed to be fired with one hand. If a pistol had a stock, it would then fall under the definition of a “short barreled rifle” and be a completely different can of worms. There are a subset of “special snowflake” long barreled pistols that have a stock, but those aren’t “the most commonly recovered firearm type reported [at crime scenes] by the ATF” as the article is discussing.
Articles like this one from Rolling Stone make me want to beat my head against my desk. I’m not necessarily angry that they are in favor of gun control — everyone is entitled to their opinion — what I’m angry about is the fact that they didn’t take five seconds to look up the definition of a pistol before pushing play on the article and publishing verifiably wrong information. Anyone with more than five seconds spent Googling the definition of the types of firearms would have not made that mistake, but instead the author chose to run with a laughably wrong definition instead of educating themselves on the objects they so dearly wish to destroy.
This is the problem with gun control activists and the mainstream media: they don’t care enough to educate themselves on the subject of firearms. This is why we have so many people demanding a ban on “assault weapons” and freaking out about silencers — they have no idea how these things work, and just want to ban things that they feel look scary. If they took just one minute to learn about the facts and statistics behind these guns they’d probably change their tune, but instead they prefer to remain ignorant and regurgitate the same anti-gun rhetoric time and again.