CNN And The Curious Case Of The 'Full Semi-Automatic' Rifle

UPDATE: Now, we have “machine gun magazines.” Yeah, folks—it gets uglier by the day.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney just said we need to ban “machine gun magazines.” ??
— Joe Perticone (@JoePerticone) February 27, 2018

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You know there were some who thought the media was actually making steps towards improving their pervasive and appalling ignorance on basic gun facts. Like knowing the difference between automatic and semi-automatic firearms, while also knowing that the latter constitutes the vast majority of guns in America. Semiautomatic is a self-reloading firearm. It fires one round per trigger pull. Once a round is fired, the energy pushes the slide back, ejecting the casing, while the next round in the magazine is pushed up and chambered as the slide comes back. The video below of a Beretta 92 9mm (the gun Bruce Willis uses in Die Hard) captures the function perfectly.

Automatic firearms fire multiple rounds per trigger pull. You can own some automatic firearms as a civilian. You need to undergo a background check, which could take up to a year or more, pay the NFA (National Firearms Act) tax stamp, and have your name and weapon serial number placed in a database. This is all run by the ATF. Legal transfers of such firearms are only for those made pre-1986. New sales of automatic firearms are banned.

Assault rifles are fully-automatic guns and new sales of them to civilians has been banned since 1986.

Assault weapons are semi-automatic guns and there are likely tens of millions of them in civilian hands.

Semi-automatic firearms likely make up a large majority of all guns.
— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) February 23, 2018

I bring this up because CNN had a rather interesting segment in which a former member of the military and the network’s military analyst, Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, wanted to show what “full semi-automatic” fire looks like from an AR-15. It wasn’t that more rounds were fired per trigger pull; he just pulled the trigger faster. That’s not the same as an automatic weapon. The Washington Free Beacon’s Stephen Gutowski noted the odd phrasing, adding that it’s sort of hard to show examples of semiautomatic and automatic firing systems when only an AR-15 is used. A M-4 Carbine, which can fire multiple rounds per trigger pull, was seen but never fired.

The weirdest part was that it was a former military guy who was seemingly against banning ARs. He fired off a few shots in slow succession then said he was going "full semi-automatic" and starting firing off individual shots more quickly. Such a weird thing.
— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) February 27, 2018

There is no such thing as “full semi-automatic fire.” I admit that I get things wrong on firearm terminology at times, but I work quickly to correct the record. You don’t see that with the mainstream media. They have a narrative to sell to liberal voters; facts will get in the way of that. Articles from Lois Beckett of the liberal Guardian publication is definitely worth your time. Her beat is firearms. She notes the glaring biases in the media, the sloppy reporting, and understands why so many gun owners and Seconds Amendment supporters distrust the media on this subject. They never learn from their mistakes, nor do they apologize for them. This nonsense, along with MSNBC interviewing a would-be school shooter to push gun control and trashing Florida Gov. Rick Scott for not meeting with student protestors, only to find out he was unavailable because he was at the funeral for one of the school shooting victims, places the media back at square one. Well, maybe a few notches back from that since we have news outlets confusing shotguns with AR-15s.

Repost - That, people, is a pump action shotgun. Semi-automatic AR-15 it is not. https://t.co/UuVXAZDrkD
— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) February 27, 2018

It’s maddening. It’s atrocious. But we need to keep recycling the facts for these people because we cannot let them just skate by on this drivel. It’s a narrative that must be fought and destroyed every time they try to pull stuff like this—and every time the Second Amendment crowd has prevailed.

Was talking to a gun owner in Louisiana a few months ago about this, and he said: when newspapers report on a car crash, they don't just get the make of the car wrong, or include basic errors about cars and how they work.
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) February 23, 2018

Yet big news outlets often make basic technical mistakes in talking about guns and gun laws. And yet they don't correct them. They keep making the same mistakes. And that tells gun owners that they don't care about accuracy, that they're not interested in getting it right.
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) February 23, 2018

If you're a gun owner, and you're seeing blatant errors and exaggeration and a tone of hysteria in the media about a consumer product that *you own,* about something that is *in your house,* why should you trust journalists reporting on other issues you might not know firsthand?
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) February 23, 2018

Last year, I listened to so many media discussions about "Why don't conservatives believe facts any more?" And as a gun beat reporter, it was so obvious: We are getting some facts wrong. Some of our coverage has clear cultural biases. Gun coverage is one dramatic example.
— Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) February 23, 2018