A delicious home-made oatmeal-raisin cookie[sup]1[/sup] to the first person who posts the glaring, exceptionally stupid error in this sentence:
I’m not even a gun nut and I’m unable to quantify the amount of wrongness.
[sub]1. I will not actually send you a delicious oatmeal-raisin cookie because I want them all for myself.[/sub]
ETA: Link.
Is a Glock a revolver? I thought Glocks had a clip of bullets in the handle.
Well, hell! Everybody knows that surveillance video is too grainy to know what kind of revolver that was. 
Bingo! There are no Glock revolvers. But you don’t even have to know that to know there’s something wrong. Think about it for a minute. Have you ever seen a revolver that looks capable of holding fifteen bullets?
(You don’t have to have mad journalistic skills to think it might be unlikely that a violet criminal would stop to reload – twice – in order to commit this rather heinous act.)
What, you never watched ol’ Hoppy shootin’ it out with the bad guys on a Saturday afternoon?
Maybe this was her service revolver.
SSG Schwartz
To be fair, someone who is not very familiar with handguns could easily make this mistake, especially when they wanted to note that it was a “service” weapon. “Service revolver” is probably far more widely used than “service handgun”, although I’ll note that “service pistol” would have been a better choice and is still a fairly common usage.
In other words, to some people, all handguns are the same, no matter what chamber loading mechanism they use.
Magazine. Not clip. Magazine.
Yeah, while it would be nice for journalists to get things like this right, i can’t get too worked up over a minor technical error like this.
The questions to ask are: Does the error affect your understanding of the story in any substantial way? If the journalist had said “handgun” or “pistol” instead of “revolver,” would the substance of the report be any different? If the answer is no, then it’s not really a big deal.
How do you know what color he was?
And is it really necessary to bring race into this?
Way back when (1984), I watched a local news report that claimed Alan Berg was shot 13 times with a semiautomatic revolver (and no, not this semi-auto revolver). I seem to remember the picture hanging behind the news guy showed a couple rifles.
The media consistently shows their ignorance about firearms, yet write smug articles about how “fast-firing” some are and need to be banned.
I read the excerpt you posted, blinked, thought: “A what with how many bullets, now?” laughed, and giggled some more.
I mean, dude, fact checking doesn’t take THAT long, does it? Considering how often shootings and gun-related stories crop up in the U.S., you’d think every newsroom floor would have a firearm sourcebook of some sort. Or, if you’re not sure, find a way around it: " (…) grabbing her service weapon and unloading (…) "
Television writers get crucified over realism and these factual errors. You’d think journalists would get crucified way more than we do. With just cause.
I’ve heard of .40 weapons but it’s pretty unusual. Was that the actual caliber for the gun, either?
And that has what do do with the OP, again?
I think it’d fall under “idiotic media gun reporting”.
I don’t know much about handguns, but according to this Wiki page, the Glock 22, Glock 23, Glock 24, Glock 27 and Glock 35 all fire .40 calibre.
Other Glocks on that page are listed as 10mm which, if my math is right, is pretty close to identical to .400 inches. Not sure if the bullets they fire are the same, though.
I don’t think getting a technical aspect wrong=wanting to get guns banned.
I donno. A reporter for a newspaper will likely have to write about crime. Crime that involves guns. I would think that somebody would have caught this error.
Also, at least around here, when reporting on any type of construction issues or accidents, a handy reference they seem to use is this. –
Backhoe = Bulldozer
Loader = Bulldozer
Excavator = Bulldozer
Grader = Bulldozer
