Shooting Blind

Press coverage of the "assault weapon" controversy suggests that most jounalists know very little about gunsand are not interested in learning.

William R. Tonso from the November 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Ignorance may account for Martin's incomplete reporting on these issues. But he went beyond ignorance when he claimed that it took him less than two hours to find a gunsmith willing to convert a "semi-automatic assault weapon" into a machine guna job that supposedly took just nine min utes. Viewers saw only about 15 seconds of the alleged conversion, not enough for even the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to determine if it had actually been carried out, though the BATF did send a letter of reprimand to CBS. In a letter to a complaining viewer, CBS claimed that the conversion had been completed but that the gun had then been immediately converted back to semi -automatic. If the gun was not fired, how did Martin know that it had in fact been converted into a machine gun? Since Martin was shown firing an automatic rifle immediately after the brief conversion footage, viewers were led to believe that they were seeing the results of the conversionunless they knew enough to recognize that the allegedly converted gun was not an M-16 like the one that was fired.

So we have only CBS's claim as evidence that a conversion was carried out at all, let alone in nine minutes. If it was carried out, CBS violated federal law and received no more than a written reprimand for doing so. If it was not carried out, CBS lied to its viewers. Either way, CBS went out of its way to help demonize "semi-automatic assault weapons" and to further the cause of the gun prohibitionists.

In a later segment of the same 48 Hours special, reporter Bernard Goldberg interviewed a Florida gun manufacturer. As Goldberg prattled on about the company's guns being used by drug dealers and other criminals, viewers got glimpses of menacing-looking pistols being test fired and prepared for shipment. Most probably did not recognize that the "assault pistols" shown, despite their menacing looks, were chambered for the low-powered .22 cartridge that has been a recreational favorite since the late 19th century. No mention was made of this fact.

Indeed, big journalism's coverage of "assault weapons" has seldom noted that the guns so labeled fire cartridges commonly used for recreation and self-defense. Quite the contrary. More often than not, the coverage has claimed that these guns are extraordinarily powerful. Some journalists have even resorted to fakery to support this false claim. According to sources in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, shortly after the 1989 Stockton schoolyard attack, a reporter and photogra pher from the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner asked a deputy to demonstrate AK-47 power by shooting a watermelon with one. The deputy replied that a gun firing the full-metal-jacketed, military ammunition used at Stockton would simply put a hole in the melon, and that is exactly what happened when he shot it. The reporter then asked the deputy to shoot a melon with his pistol, which he did. Though far less powerful than the rifle, his 9mm pistol fired an expanding hollow-point slug that splattered the melon impressively. Both the puncturing of a melon by the more-powerful rifle and the splattering of a melon by the less-powerful pistol were captured on film. The Herald Examiner then published the photograph of the splattered melon but credited the rifle.

About that time, splattered-watermelon demonstrations started appearing on KABC in Los Angeles and other California stations as well as on the national news, but the connection to the Herald Examiner fakery, if any, is not clear. It is possible that some of these TV demonstrations were honest. As gun control opponent Neal Knox has shown in a Gun Owners of America video, military-style 7.62x39mm slugs fired from an AK-47 can splatter a watermelon, apparently depending on the melon's ripeness and other variables. Even if these TV splatterings were actually produced by AK-47s, however, the demonstrations were still deceptive unless they also showed what ordinary guns will do to a melon, as an ABC News special did on January 24, 1990. While ABC showed an AK-47 putting baseball-sized holes in watermelons and the Gun Owners of America video featured splatter ing fruit, both demonstrations also showed common sporting guns vaporizing watermelons.

Despite their destructive capability, no one is calling for a ban on sporting weapons, because hunting and target shooting are still widely considered acceptable reasons for owning a gun. By contrast, military-style semi-automatics are said to be fit only for drug dealers and mass murderers. Yet police figures show that "assault weapons" are rarely used in crimes, and such guns have a number of legitimate civilian uses that could be easily discovered by any journalist curious enough to look for them.

Though American shooters were not immediately attracted by the non-traditional appearance of these otherwise fairly unremarkable guns, their durability and, ironically, their media-generated notoriety have helped increase interest in them. For the first time in our history, American troops are equipped with rifles of a type (automatic or burst-fire) difficult or (in some states) impossible for civilians to own legally. Hence, civilians interested in the military-style rifle matches long supported by the federal government have to use semi-automatic­only variations of our recent and current military rifles. Many farmers and ranchers in sparsely settled areas have accepted certain models of these light but durable military-style semi-automatics as varmint and utility rifles. Boaters off the coast of Florida, wary of armed drug runners, also seem to have acquired an interest in such guns, and so have collectors and hobbyists. In other words, it is demonstrably false that civilians have no practical, sporting, or recreational uses for these military-style semi-automatics.

But the most important reason American civilians should have access to these guns has nothing to do with recreation or even with defense against criminals. It has to do with the main purpose of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an aspect of the "assault weapon" story that the national press has almost completely ignored. The Second Amendment states: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." This amendment is seldom even mentioned in establishment news coverage of the gun issue, even though it is the main source of opposition to gun controls. With the exceptions of 1983 PBS and 1993 A&E documentaries, a May 22, 1995, U.S. News & World Report article, and a few conservative, libertarian, and populist columnists, what little journalistic commentary that does mention the amendment almost invariably claims that its meaning is unclear, that it is outdated and should be repealed, or that it protects only the right of the National Guard to possess guns.

But the meaning of the Second Amendment is very clear to the vast majority of scholars who have examined the paper trail left by the Founders. James Madison's friend Tench Coxe expressed their concerns succinctly in 1789: "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."

The Founders also made it clear that the "militia" consisted of the whole armed people. The Federalist Papers and other writings indicate that they feared large professional military forces and select militias (like the National Guard). Citizens and their privately owned guns were part of the system of checks and balances that the Founders felt was necessary to keep government from drift ing into tyranny. Authors of the 50 law review articles that support this interpretation include such prominent, liberal, non­gun-owning scholars as Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, Akhil R. Amar of Yale, and William Van Alstyne of Duke.

According to Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code, the National Guard is still only the orga nized part of a militia that consists of practically all able-bodied males and some females between the ages of 17 and 45 who are citizens of the United States or have declared an intention to become citizens. The only 20th-century Supreme Court ruling touching on the Second Amendment (U.S. v. Miller, 1939) acknowledged that militiamen called to service "were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time " [emphasis added]. In 1939, American troops were equipped with semi-automatic pistols and were being equipped with semi -automatic rifles. Now our troops are equipped with less-powerful but higher-magazine-capacity semi-automatic pistols and less-powerful but burst-fire and higher-magazine-capacity rifles.

American citizens have traditionally had access to rifles and pistols with more power and magazine capacity than those issued to common soldiers. In keeping with the traditional American view of the militia, the Army's Office of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship has long sold sur plus pistols, rifles, and carbines, including semi-automatics, to the public at bargain-basement prices. No one claims that Americans have caused problems with these surplus military small arms. Yet since common soldiers started carrying automatic or burst-fire rifles, American citizens have no longer had access to up-to-date military small arms, and federal law now even restricts their access to semi-automatic variations of these guns. So not only do we have the large professional military and select militia that the Founders feared, but there is a movement afoot to get militarily effective small arms out of civilian hands.

Big journalism has not examined the implications of these developments, instead treating the Second Amendment as, at best, an anachronism. In a March 1990 column titled "The Second Amendment Gets No Respect," Mike Moore, then editor of The Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists, wrote that "in 30 years in the business it's hard to imagine a subject...that has inspired more poor reporting and silly editorial commentary." As I've suggested, much of that poor reporting and silly commentary is the result of ignorance. Ted Gest of U.S. News & World Report acknowledged in a 1992 Media Studies Journal article that few of today's journalists know much about guns. In an article introducing USA Today 's extended examination of the gun issue at the end of 1993, Tony Mauro wrote that in his paper's newsroom, "which prides itself on drawing its staff from a cross section of the nation, it was hard to find editors and reporters who had ever pulled a trigger."

But if ignorance explains sloppy reporting and commentary on the gun issue that has been going on for decades, journalists don't seem interested in overcoming that ignorance by learning about guns and the legitimate uses to which they are put by millions of Americans. Moreover, since journalistic misinformation on guns invariably favors the gun prohibitionists, something more than ignorance must be involved.

All but a few leading columnists and editors of major newspapers have taken a strong stand in support of stricter gun controls. Guns are also unpopular among the higher-ups at broadcast-news organizations. Michael Gartner, before he was sacked as president of NBC News over the GM-truck scam, used a guest column in USA Today to call for repeal of the Second Amendment.