Yes, but it’s a convenient shorthand, as everyone knows bulldozers are dangerous.
Pretty lame as a pitting IMHO. The inaccuracies are hardly important to the story. Journos get all sorts of details wrong in all sorts of stories - why should gun-related stories be any different?
Perhaps this was her service revolver, and the error was “Glock” as the manufacturer.
Wouldn’t this be “phylum” or “genus” or something? Is there a biologist is the house?
Man, I just saw a TV show about that last night. Looks like somebody coulda used a hug.
It can be much, much worse. I personally attended a gun control rally at university where a uniformed local cop held up an SKS and said “this is an AK-47, the primary tool of the drug dealer!” One person actually got up to the microphone and tried to correct the cop, and was told by the moderator (who didn’t allow the cop to answer) with a dripping sneer to his voice “Um, I think cops know more about guns than civilians.” :rolleyes: Yeah, right.
I think the point being made is that those who would want guns banned (or at least suggest it for the purposes of circulation) don’t know the first thing about them.
I don’t think that is says anything about the argument for or against itself. But it does say something about the arguers, though I wouldn’t cast “the media” as such a monolithic entity that jtgain does.
Actually, .40 cal weapons are rapidly becoming commonplace, especially among cops. The .40 cal S&W was designed as a “happy” medium between the 9mm and the .45. The jury is still out on exactly how good a cartridge it is, but quite a few police departments now issue or require the cartridge.
All it says about the author of the article is that a few technical aspects of the story were wrong. Making unfounded assumptions about the author, and about those who believe differently about the usefulness of guns in our society, on the other hand, does say something about you.
One of the arguments made by gun control supporters is the “all handguns are evil” argument. In essence, the argument is that the only purpose of a handgun is to kill or injure somebody. So the fewer handguns out there, the fewer people will be shot, and the better off we all are.
A possible response to this argument is to point out that police are armed with handguns, so why not disarm the police first?
I’ve noticed that many newspapers have an anti-gun slant, and in my opinion, referring to a police handgun as a “service revolver” is a way of suggesting that the police are not carrying big bad evil handguns - they are carrying good handguns.
Just a theory of mine.
My general sense is that the large majority of “mistakes” made by newspaper and TV reporters regarding guns tend to favor the anti-gun side of things. Perhaps I’m just more sensitive to one kind of mistake, but I think that there’s a decent amount of bias there.
Yes, and there is a term for it.
Confirmation Bias.
My only assumption about the author is that they did not know those technical details. This, to me, seems like a fair assumption.
I did not claim the argument being put forth was mine, only that that was what I thought the argument was. Perhaps you shouldn’t make unfounded assumptions about the author of my posts. 
My response was to the original post, not to your response of it. Therefore, your response to my response was irresponsible. 
I may be wrong in painting all of the media with the same brush, but as brazil84 says, show me a technical mistake that the media makes that tends to promote guns rather than vilify them.
During any debate about “assault weapons” (which is in itself a nonsense term) you hear from various media sources about how “powerful” and “fast-firing” and “high capacity” they are without the most basic knowledge of firearms.
I don’t see how the example in the OP shows an anti-gun bias, idiotic though the reference is.
You could wonder about the way certain stories are phrased, though.
For instance, this account of the search for a fugitive wanted on sex crime charges contains the following paragraph:
“After that, Cortez was charged with having guns illegally. Police said they found several handguns, a hunting rifle and a black assault rifle in the home.”
What constitutes a “black assault rifle”? Are they more powerful and scarier than brown or green assault rifles? Should they be legal only in pink, on the theory that people would be less likely to use them in a violent manner (former Iowa football coach Hayden Fry had the visitors’ locker room painted pink because he thought that would make opposing players less aggressive. So maybe this is the solution to gun crime as well)?
the .40 S&W round is essentially a shortened, somewhat less powerful version of the 10mm Auto. Because of the compactness of the round it became the favorite of law enforcement for high capacity service autoloading pistols after it was realized that the 9mm Parabellum round wasn’t the end-all be-all of handgun rounds that Hollywood portrayed. To complete the circle, Sig-Sauer came up with a round called the .357 SIG, which is a .40 S&W-sized cartridge necked down to a 9mm round, ostensibly giving the same ballistics as the vaunted .357 Magnum out of a short-barreled revolver. Whether there is any material different in stopping potential between these rounds is questionable, but it sure makes for a revolving door of firearms purchases by large law enforcement agencies; another triumph for marketing, IMHO. (I’ll stick with a SIG P220 in the venerable .45 ACP, thank you.)
Anyway, the .40 S&W and 10mm Auto are not, despite using same diameter case and same weight bullets, not interchangable in autoloading pistols, though presumably you could fire a .40 S&W in the rare revolver chambered for the 10mm Auto. I have never heard of a revolver chambered for the .40 S&W (and certainly not one that would contain 15 rounds), but the Glock 22 does have a 15 round magazine (not a “clip”). I have a hard time as seeing this statement as any kind of anti-gun conspiracy; more likely just another member of the Fourth Estate who lacks basic knowledge upon the topic on which he or she is reporting, and is unwilling to take the time or exert the effort to do minimal fact-checking, those skills not being emphasized in journalism or communications schools, I guess. Anyway, for pure density of fallacy regarding firearms, nothing beats the line uttered by Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2: “That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany. It dosen’t show up on you airport X-ray machines, and it cost more than you make here in a month.”
Can anyone spot all five errors in that statement?
Stranger
Going entirely from memory, no Googling…
- no model 7
- not porcelain, duh
- not made in Germany?
- does show up on X-ray (for fucks sake, that one’s stupid)
- um…more than a month? I guess if he’s like 15 or something.
Well, if the gun is fictional, then #5 could be true, no?
It’s possible that you’re the one who is biased. Nahhhhh. Couldn’t be.
Certainly there’s a lot of anti-gun bias in newspaper and TV reporting.