Okay, usually I don’t wear a tin foil hat when it comes to gun stories, but this one takes the cake. Two shotguns, a rifle, and a box of ammo counts as an “arsenal”?
The article also states that he had “enough ammo to kill perhaps 30 people”. It sounds a lot scarier than saying he had 30 rounds of ammunition. Keep in mind that three ten round mags would be perfectly legal even under the expired AWB.
It is ill-informed and biased articles like this which do not help the debate about guns. Watch IL propose new laws to deal with keeping “arsenals” at home…
You should. People argue over the various biases of the media but about the most clear cut issue is guns. Nearly all popular media is unambiguously biased against guns - exaggerating bad uses, underreporting good uses, giving air time to gun control advocates, never giving a gun advocate a real chance to speak, etc.
For example, if a school shooting happens, it’s on the news 24/7 for weeks. If a school shooting is prevented by a civilian with a gun, it isn’t covered at all. There are at least two cases I can recall where this was the case but there was zero media coverage.
Googling “media bias guns” brings up a lot of information about it.
And of course it has a LOT to do with this irrational phobia about guns that seems to be becoming more prevalent outside of rural America. There’s a thread over at Snopes about a 10-year-old who was forced out of a hunter junior gun-safety class because he argued with the instructor when that instructor started spouting right-wing idiocy about Obama. Well, it took no more than three posts before someone started in about how they were shocked and disturbed that a 10-year-old was allowed to handle a gun at all and they were off to the races…total hijack and the thread was done as far as the original issue was concerned.
Guns are not evil. Guns are not sinister. Guns are not sentient shape-shifted aliens just waiting for an excuse to shoot their owner or his family in the back. Yes, guns can be dangerous, but that’s why you have gun-safety classes. It’s idiots and children uneducated about gun safety who make guns dangerous.
Three guns are an arsenal? WTF? We would have taken about 50 shells with each of us hunting squirrels and rabbits so wee could switch ammo. Most farms must be a bunker with several arsenals.
I’m always leery of posting something like that because there are always some people who aren’t completely batshit stupid about guns who will assume that I place them in that category. But when you have what really does seem to me, in reading message board postings from some people, a belief that a gun is some sort of evil totem, some metallic Zuni fetish doll that will surely end up shooting Karen Black in the head through its own malevolent will, then we’re definitely talking batshit crazy. And though I am exaggerating, there seems to be an awful lot of sentiment that owning a gun, in and of itself, marks one as either stupid or so right-wing as to be a militia member.
I suspect it has less to do with “the media want gun control” and more to do with “tales of carnage increase viewers/readers”. If you can terrify the populace into thinking that there are maniacs roaming the streets armed with automatic weapons and bazookas, you can be damn sure they’ll be tuning in to learn more. Conversely, a news story which tells you that “a bad thing might have happened but someone stopped it” is boring.
There was a recent case in the paper here where a “celebrity” (for lack of a better word) named Jade who is dying of cancer awoke in her hospital bed to find a stranger in her room, holding a hammer. She screamed, help came, and the person was arrested. The headline in one paper the next day: “Jade Hammer Maniac Attack!”. Because “Jade Hammer-Owning Person Just Standing There” doesn’t shift papers.
Speaking off the cuff, I almost wonder at times if this is something they teach in Journalism schools. I grew up with several people who used to go shooting on a weekly basis, who perhaps shot tens if not hundreds of thousands of rounds at targets over their teen years - and every single one of them, after going to the KU WAW School of Journalism turned into anti-gun advocates. Later on I found out that one of them, who actually wrote a published piece on how ALL (yes ALL) semi-automatic guns should be banned, still faithfully kept his semi-auto .22, 9mm, and 20-gauge shotgun in a closet, unlocked, unsecured, with boxes of ammo next to them. For some, gun control is always great for the other guy, I guess.
Well, to be honest, I felt that way too for a while. I grew up in England, wayyy out in the country, and I knew exactly three people who owned guns (and even those were long guns and seemed pretty useless for hunting anything larger than a pheasant). Somehow, though, I managed to get shot. At a rifle range.
Then I had a roommate in college who slept with a gun under his mattress, but was otherwise totally “normal”. Plus, there are tons of reasonable people here who like guns. Thus, my opinion mellowed a bit.
What’s “underreporting good uses?” There aren’t enough programs about how target shooting is nice? I have no problem with it, but that just isn’t very interesting to anybody other than the target shooters (whose needs are probably covered by a magazine or web page). When a home owner shoots a robber, that tends to get coverage, although perhaps not to the same overblown extent as a random tragedy where a whole family gets murdered.
The real answer is closer to this:
The real bias in the media is toward drama. “Arsenal” doesn’t have a specific definition as far as I know, but sounds more dramatic than “three guns.” Whether it’s a lot of ammunition or not, 400 of anything sounds like a lot, so it’s included for that reason.
The bottom line is this: most people in the press probably know very little about guns. This leads to errors in coverage, which are frequently pointed out on the SDMB, as well as alarmism. I know nothing about guns myself, although for my job I don’t need to - but if you’re doing the local nightly news and a gun story comes up now and then, or covering a school shooting for CNN, and you don’t know what specific terms mean and misapply them, it becomes an issue. Whether you think guns are scary or not, it’s easy to make them sound scary, particularly if you don’t know much about them and your audience doesn’t either.
I guess this is true. It goes hand-in-hand with idiocies like “What common household object will scramble your DNA and cause you to give birth to four-headed monsters? We’ll find out later in the hour. BUT FIRST! A local woman gives a home to a litter of fuzzy puppies. We go to Prima Donna for that story…”
This is really nothing compared to how they always call things “assault rifles” that aren’t. They’ve called AR-15s, Mini-14s, and even SKSs (which were invented more than half a century ago and only hold 10 rounds) assault rifles. To say nothing of the term “assault weapon” which was invented out of whole cloth by the anti gun lobby.
I once showed a hipster girl an SKS and she was like, “oh my God, don’t you need a permit for that?” In Indiana.
It’s just a case of ignorance more than anything else.
I know this is totally unscientific, but if you told people somebody had an arsenal of guns and then asked them about how many they thought it meant, I think you’d find most of the answers were in the range of 8 to 10 or more, not three. It’s accurate but makes it sound worse.
Don’t forget the nuts going on shooting sprees, wouldn’t want to leave them out. That said I have something very near a hundred rounds of ammo, and I haven’t owned the gun they belong to in years.
The article didn’t say he had 30 rounds of ammunition at his house though, it said “Authorities said Sedlacek also brought to the church [in which he shot the pastor] enough ammunition to perhaps kill 30 people.” Still semi-sensationalist, but I think we can agree that while having 30 rounds of ammunition in your house is not scary, bringing 30 rounds of ammunition to go shoot up a church is.
To put things into perspective for those of you who don’t know guns that much, 550 rounds of .22 is one box. Less than $15 worth of ammo, and basically the normal size you can buy of .22. I’ve got thousands of rounds in my house. And it’s because ammo is less expensive in bulk, and it’s not getting any cheaper, not because I have delusions of Red Dawn.
