What really baffled me is, at a press conference held in the evening the chief of the Virginia Tech Police was asked the same 2-3 questions multiple times. He badly clarified the whole, “we’re not looking for anyone” then later saying “well, you can take this to mean we could be looking for someone.” But aside from that I think he conducted himself fairly well considering in the span of 2-3 minutes I heard a few reporters ask the EXACT SAME QUESTION, phrased slightly differently.
For example:
Reporter: Is there any indication that the shooter was a student?
Chief: We don’t have any positive I.D. at this time.
…few questions later:
Different Reporter: So does it appear that the shooter was a student at the school?
Chief: We don’t have any positive I.D. at this time.
That kind of thing happened again and again, to the point it was driving me crazy. These reporters were literally like a little kid, who asks Mom a question over and over again, somehow hoping that if they can just repeat the question enough, the answer might magically change.
Exactly, that’s what I keep hearing. Shocked tone of voice: “He entered the classroom and fired off an entire round!!!”
And I was sitting there thinking, “Um… With 30 people dead, he must have shot off a bit more than that.”
It makes the news stories really confusing to read. If you’re trying to follow the sequence of events, emptying an entire magazine is really not the same thing as “firing a round”.
I think it’s a salutary experience to be interviewed/quoted. If you’re interviewed twice, your quote will be mis-quoted, taken out of context, or misconstrued once, IME.
I think it’s more often borne of the not-so-stellar IQ of many reporters, and sloppiness, rather than malign intentions. Whatever the reason, though, I’ve been interested to watch several friends, who had previously believed everything the New York Times editorial page or the like told them to believe, move away from their bien pensant viewpoint not because of some great political conversion, not even because of the Jayson Blair type incidents, but because they finally had the experience of being interviewed by a moronic reporter who grossly distorted their statements, usually out of ignorance or laziness. One guy’s conversion came after a television segment on alleged environmental issues in the natural gas drilling industry – the reporter who interviewed him sententiously delivered her outro while standing dramatically posed in front of and gesturing toward a pump-jack (one of those bobbing hammerhead looking things) – which are of course used to extract oil, not gas.
Depends. You hit a large biomass pretty much dead center with a full round and you’re looking at carnage pieces about the size of a fruit fly. That shit can reek up in a hurry.
To be fair, I am under the impression that with that phrase they were **quoting ** the words of one of the persons at the scene, in whose defense I’d say I would not be expecting to be concerned with grammatial correction under the circumstances. Doesn’t excuse though, not correcting it after a few repetitions and printings to the still not tech-accurate but colloquially accepted “a full clip”. All you need is to make it no longer a direct quote.
You know, that the rest of the world is not the SDMB is a mixed blessing. If the people out there, from Jane Citizen to the TV news reporter to George W, waited to be sure of using the correct technical term to describe their impressions of what happens, it would be an extremely quiet place.
Back to OP: :rolleyes: at the dread-weapon spin. ooOOH! They can fit a 15-round extended clip! :rolleyes: … so that means he reloads once instead of twice. Please. What if he had been packing a couple of Colt 1911’s? OK, so then he has to reload four times – but they’d be talking as to how he picked the most lethal ammo he could find.
You sometimes hear about offenders being armed with “Automatic Revolvers”, as well. Kind of makes you wonder where the sort of people who hold up liquor stores get their hands on a [Webley-Fosbery](http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver) , seeing as the pistol’s worth more than anything they’re likely to get from a liquor store or 7-11.
Similarly, I wouldn’t consider a .223 or 7.62x39 calibre rifle to be “high-powered”. Sure, they’re not capguns, but they’re not exactly one’s first choice for hunting Lions or Tigers whilst on Safari or anything like that…
I shudder to think what they would say about my weapons. My carry piece is a Glock 27 loaded with .40 S&W Federal Hydra-Shok JHP ammunition.
If the past is any indication, it would be something like this: I’m carrying a “plastic gun” that doesn’t show up on x-ray machines, has a massive amount of ammunition, using “cop-killer” or “dum dum” rounds created for the purpose of killing as many people as possible, and is a small, cheap, “Saturday Night Special”.
None of these things are true in the abstract, but they can all be spun that way, and have been in the past. Example: In the early 1990s there was a real danger of legislation to ban hollowpoint bullets when Winchester released their Black Talon brand of ammunition. The simple fact is that due to the expanding nature of the bullet there is reduced penetration, and you are therefore less likely to hit anything behind the target. But hysteria is rarely dissuaded by fact, which is terribly unfortunate.
Have they ID’d the shooters weapons, other than “9mm?” As a point of reference, my Browning High Power comes standard with 13 round magazines. (Well, it did at the time I bought it.)
I was really annoyed by that. If I had been the Chief I would have started kicking people out after they repeatedly asked a question I had already refused to answer.
OMG. So he was carrying a plastic gun that was designed to evade X-ray machines, along with multiple “clips” from which he fired “rounds” of bullets. Most likely the deadlist bullets he could find, too!
I want one. It’s on my list of classic handguns that I must own. Of course, no way I can have one shipped into CA with one of those deadly >10 round “clips”.
This infuriates me as well, and it even happens with a single interviewer. I was watching Wolf Blitzer questioning the Middle Eastern student who’d taken the cell phone footage CNN was (and still is) running incessantly— they’d given him his own microphone and flashed a title identifying him as a “CNN I-Reporter” (quick promotion, I guess).
It was evident, to anyone with a brain, when they had exhausted the guy’s knowledge about what he’d seen and heard, and yet Blitzer continued to pose question after speculative question just to have the kid strain to formulate another phrasing of “I really don’t know.”