Gerard Butler as Machine Gun Preacher

How can someone take the time to write a pro-gun control editorial without taking the time to learn the difference between a semi-automatic rifle (one trigger press per round fired) and an automatic rifle (one trigger press sends multiple rounds downrange)? The cynical amongst you will claim it’s the Sugermann syndrome: an intentional obfuscation (like the term “assault rifle”) to make AR-style rifles seem unconscionably deadly. Me? I think it’s . . .

pure laziness. Oh, and unabashed contempt for facts. Here’s an example by Fran David, Hayward California’s retired City Manager, via mercurynews.com:

I am a responsible gun owner. It would not occur to me to be without one or more guns for protection against the uncertainties and challenges of life. Nor would it ever occur to me to stockpile weapons, own and use automatic weapons, or utilize large-capacity magazines. These latter things are part and parcel of our trained and equipped state militia and national military.

The recent events in Sutherland Springs, Texas, provide real-world support for this perspective. The perpetrator had an automatic attack weapon with large-capacity magazines, while the hero that brought him down simply had a single rifle designed to defend and protect.

President Trump stated, “If the neighbor who confronted the gunman hadn’t had a rifle, instead of having 26 dead, you would have had hundreds more dead.” However, if the gunman hadn’t had automatic weaponry and large-capacity magazines, far fewer people in that church would have likely been killed and injured before the gunman was brought down.

This is the point where I usually ask “in a country with 300m+ guns, what are the odds of EVER making it impossible for evil people to get ahold of a firearm?” But today’s lesson is: how can people trust the opinion of someone who can’t even be bothered to get their basic facts straight? I’m looking at Fran David and the editors of the Mercury News.

The answer, I’m afraid, is the old adage “in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” Your average American is highly uneducated, unprepared to use what critical thinking abilities God and/or their parents gave them. So they’re oblivious to ignorance and glom-on to BS like the following:

Our current reasonable and logical gun ownership regulations in California need to be in place in every state, rigorously and consistently enforced, and applied to both the public and private sale of guns.

We need to build on these regulations by immediately banning the private ownership of automatic assault weapons, bump stocks, large capacity magazines and silencers.

It’s time to stop the rhetoric and partisan hard-lining, and get about doing the business of the people for the protection of both the people and the Constitution.

The good news? Americans love guns! Well, most do. And most of the ones who do have a consumer-based interest in knowing the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic firearm.

They rightly see people like Fran David as ill-informed spoil sports. Which is not quite as good as seeing gun control advocates as a clear and present danger to their life and liberty, but that’ll do pig. That’ll do.

NOTE: After this post was published and the editorialist was spanked in The Mercury News’ comments section, the following correction was added and [some of] the offending text amended. “Correction: This commentary has been updated to correct the type of weapon used by the gunman in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, shooting — it was an assault rifle, not an automatic weapon — and by the hero who shot him — who also used an assault rifle, not a “single rifle.”

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54 COMMENTS

    • Imagine running in to 20 of him a day and hearing that crap when you get singled out as the “gun guy” in the room…. Good news is most persons can be educated and the facts can be sorted out (not all, but most). Bad news is people like this rely on group think to get by most of the time.

      • Yes they can get it sorted out, Richard, but in the space of things that doesn’t really matter. Gun-controllers use a whole inventory of terms like “automatic weapon”, “weapon of war” as metaphors to signal their moral superiority. It doesn’t matter much to them if their actual knowledge of firearms or even things mechanical is so limited that they can’t understand the differences in semi-automatic and fully-automatic weapons because technical accuracy isn’t important to them. What is important is using gun-controller approved language in the telling of their narrative. In gun-controller culture, using intentionally inaccurate weapon terminology is an act of defiance, a kind of wink-and-a-nod form of virtue-signalling.

  5. These people (I use that term very loosely here) do this to further their civilian disarmament agenda. They don’t care about definitions, facts, or intellectual honesty. That shit only gets in the way of their agenda. The best course of action when reading or watching the news is to go ahead and expect anything involving a gun to be wrong as well as anything that follows.

    • As of 1702 hrs (San Francisco time), The SJ Mercury put this at the head of thw article…. It appears they have listened to our counter ranting:

      NOVEMBER 27, 2017 at 5:02 pm

      Correction: This commentary has been updated to correct the type of weapon used by the gunman in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, shooting — it was an assault rifle, not an automatic weapon — and by the hero who shot him — who also used an assault rifle, not a “single rifle.”

      • Still wrong. It wasn’t an assault rifle. It was a semi-automatic rifle. LOL. When you willfully lie because of politics, IT MAKES YOU EVIL.

        • I know… and the comments section under the origi al news article drives that point about “assault rifle” home too. But, we’re talking about the San Francisco Bay Area media machine. The fact that they even partially amended the text and are allowing public comments is a miracle. Any article linked to MS news/bing has completely shut down any comments.

        • Per the official, legal definition in California, they WERE both “assault rifles”.

          More concerning is the myth that State National Guards are “The Militia”, and

          “It’s time to stop the rhetoric and partisan hard-lining, and get about doing the business of the people for the protection of both the people and the Constitution.”

          While parroting the partisan Democrat hard-line rhetoric and ignoring the FACT that everything they have done in California is in violation of the Second Amendment protections of the U.S. Constitution.

  7. I am guessing “trained and equipped state militia” is referring to the National Guard which is also a pretty ridiculous statement. You could argue it is *a* militia, sure, but definitely not *the* militia.

    • My thought exactly!

      A state militia, as understood by the Framers, meant people who would show up with their personally-owned military weapons with which they had engaged in regular practice. That was a _minimum_. That so many did not live up to that (as noted by George Washington in letters to the Continental Congress) does not invalidate the truth.

      • I doubt the framers had a conception of a “state militia” as the 2A refers to a “militia” and, according to dictionary.com’s word origin section, militia “[i]n U.S. history, [means] ‘the whole body of men declared by law amenable to military service, without enlistment, whether armed and drilled or not’ (1777).” So basically, men who can fight. Not children, cripples, or old men.

        A “state militia” and the militia contemplated in the 2A are anathema. Liberals thinking screaming “militia,” “militia means police,” or “militia means National Guard” think that’s a winning argument. The winning argument is the one from Heller because that’s the argument that won. The argument about what the founders meant by militia will be won in looking at what the word militia meant at the founding.

        • The Founders would see the words “state militia” as an oxymoron. Two words which contradict each other.

        • “Militia” meant the general population at large capable of bearing arms. “Select militia” was the term used to refer to formal government militias. The Founders were very wary of such things as they historically had been used by princes and kings to keep a standing army on the cheap. Hamilton in Federalist 29 calls for the creation of such select militias to supplement the militia at large, but he acknowledges that the idea wouldn’t gain much traction.

          Gun controllers claim as an article of faith that everywhere the Constitution mentions “militia,” it is in reference to formal state militias, even though there is no evidence of such and a ton of evidence refuting such an idea.

          • “The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is [a bad and impossible idea]. [It takes a lot of work for people to develop the needed skills]. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to [train properly for militia duty], would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss.” Federalist 29.

            All the militia = all the citizens, or at least “the great body” thereof.

      • I would propose, rather, that “The militia” would be composed of those men who could fight, but also who were WILLING to show up with their own weapons, prepared to fight…IF THEY AGREED WITH YOUR CAUSE.

        A significant number of American colonists at the time were not in agreement with the revolution and it would have been futile to expect them to answer your call to arms.

  8. AR-15 used by murderer = “automatic attack weapon with large-capacity magazines.”

    AR-15 used by Hero Stephen Willeford = “a single rifle designed to defend and protect.”

    Conclusion: Ban AR-15s?

    Yeah, I don’t get it either.

  9. Oh a multitude know the difference…they want to ban anything that goes “BANG”. That is the obvious end-game.

    • The lead picture on the paper’s website shows “3 variations of the AR-15″….. which shows the same AR-15 with the stock in the three different collapsible possitions…. shoulder thingy that goes up indeed

  11. It would not occur to me to be without one or more guns for protection against the uncertainties and challenges of life. Nor would it ever occur to … utilize large-capacity magazines.
    So…apparently he’s certain that the uncertainties of life never require more than ten rounds?

    These latter things are part and parcel of our trained and equipped state militia and national military.
    So…Hayward, California’s police don’t use 11 round or larger magazines?

  12. This is why we need NFA or at least Hughes repeal introduced. Even if it doesn’t go anywhere how are the libtards going to panic and faint against it without explaining the difference?

    • Repeal everything from WWII on — and include language recognizing the Second Amendment as a guarantor of everything from personal self-defense to the right if insurrection.

      • That comes from FDR’s uber corrupt supreme court, not any law. You know, the “court” with a KKK leader that declared the 13th amendment a suggestion and actually wrote, point blank in an official court document, “legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect. That is not to say that all such restrictions are unconstitutional. “

  13. Semi is an European term being adopted here in America for some time now. The terms that use to be common here were Automatic and Fully-automatic. Automatic means will reload/cycle itself. An Auto 5 isn’t full-auto.

  14. Automatic Attack Rifle? A “single rifle”? Both parties had semi-automatic assault rifles, and that’s why it ended when it did instead of the psycho continuing his spree. (Semi-automatic) assault rifles are a good thing for unlicensed normie pleb civilians to have.

    • An assault rifle is by definition select fire, which is to say it can be fully automatic with the flip of a selector switch. “Semi-automatic assault rifle” is a contradiction in terms, like “motorless motorcycle” or “pressureless wind tunnel”. You’ve just gone about describing a bicycle and a vacuum chamber in misleadingly complicated terms. The only AR-15 pattern assault rifles are the M4 and M16 rifles issued by the military, very few of which were available before the ’86 ban and are subject to onerous regulation even in the rare case that one is legal to posess.

      The AR-15s in question, as well as almost every AR-15 owned by the American public, are semiautomatic rifles. Nothing more, nothing less. You can also call them “modern sporting rifles”, but in my opinion that’s as much of a misleading weasel word category as “assault weapon” (not to be confused with “assault rifle”, which the media has incorrectly been using to describe all black colored guns since they abandoned “assault weapon”). Both categories arbitrarily include some guns and exclude others that meet the same criteria. If you want to be clear about the legal status of fully automatic firearms, you can refer to them as “civilian legal semiautomatic rifles”. Otherwise you can just call it a rifle, because the pistol grip, flash hider and “shoulder-thing-that-goes-up”-brand barrel shroud don’t make it any different from an SKS or a Mini-14.

    • What’s this “single” rifle bit?
      I assume their referring to a simi auto rifle, but, to me, the term “single” rifle only means “one” rifle, not multiple rifles.

  15. Put me down for cynic. I view the “ignorance” as purposeful simply because that’s how libtards operate. The facts play no part in the agenda. Their plan is to keep parroting the lies until enough of the clueless are brainwashed into compliance

  16. Umm, didn’t the shooter and the guy who shot the shooter have the same model gun? Just asking. Seems to be short on intelligence and possibly facts.

  19. Another question is why is the black gun called an assault rifle? By definition an assault rifle is one with selective fire modes aka safe, semi-auto, auto (3 round or full). If you can’t get the terms right then how can anyone listen to your argument?

  20. “Note to Gun Control Advocates: A Semi-Automatic Rifle is Not an Automatic Rifle!”

    You can explain it 100 different ways, one hundred different times and they still wouldn’t get it…

  21. We know the differrnce since 100 years. They could’ve known for 100 years as well. There is no point in trying to teach them, if they were smart people looking for actual facts they wouldn’t be out there trying to hunt down inanimate objects. They will continue to ignore this fact, as well as every other fact there has ever been. That is the point of a ideology after all.

    • He once got a 1911-type pistol to fire at a cyclic rate of about 600+ rounds-per-minute.

      Not even exaggerating.

    • True, but machine guns (in the legal sense) have always been referred to as “fully automatic”, with the sole exception (to my knowledge) being the BAR, or Browning Automatic Rifle. In a technical sense there are only two kinds of actions, self-loading or “automatic”, and manual. That doesn’t mean you should expect to be understood when you talk about a car with an automatic transmission but you’re actually describing a supercar.

  25. I respectfully disagree. This is not ignorance. This is yet another in a long list of instances of those with an agenda to mislead.
    I had an epiphany when this type of propaganda was used in 1993 during discussion of an AWB. The “news” talking head spoke of semi-auto “assault weapons” but the video over his shoulder showed people shooting full auto.
    When the people of the gun contacted the news media to educate them, they said “Oh… Thanks for bringing this to our attention.” But, they kept on showing the video of full auto when talking about semi-auto. Josef Goebbels would be proud.
    Check out “big lie” on Wiki
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

  26. The guy who stopped the assault (10 minutes before the police got there) seems like a pretty responsible gun owner. He becomes “irresponsible” if he has a few more guns?

    What features that help him shoot would The Mercurial Editorialist there take away from him? Costing how many more dead? (They’re just expendable church people, but still…) Or is the N R A instructor not “responsible” owning any number of guns, what with his Rambo-ing that vengeful spray of … er … a single, precisely aimed shot that did exactly what he intended? (One shot at full auto is a neat trick.)

    I’m glad The Mercurial Editorialist, there, thinks she is responsible. How many active assaults could she stop with her single, single shot musket? Becuase letting people die when you could have done something is responsible.

  27. You know he is blowing smoke up your a$$ when they say this “..Our current reasonable and logical gun ownership regulations in California..” Hardly reasonable and logical here, even the courts have said the firearm laws in California are byzantine at best and designed to trap otherwise law abiding people.

  28. Speaking of Hollywood. . .

    is it just me, or (after watching an as-real-as-you’re-going-to-get-out-of-the-idiot-Hollywood-crowd [~ 13 Hours] (no really great examples come to mind) ??? ) do the movies with guns look really fake and stupid anyway, regardless of how ‘correct’ they attempt to make them?

    It makes you look back at all of them and go “eww”.

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