Advice on weaponry

If You’re Trying To Ban Guns, The Least You Can Do Is Learn The Basics
In a debate imbued with emotion, gun-control advocates rely on ignorance

By David Harsanyi
MARCH 7, 2018

Can anyone imagine a major newspaper running an op-ed justifying public ignorance on public policy? Actually, not merely justifying the ignorance, but rather arguing that facts only help smother discourse rather than enhance it. It’s improbable. Then again, this is the gun debate. And one side benefits from policy illiteracy.

The Washington Post ran an op-ed by former Gawker writer Adam Weinstein arguing that Second Amendment advocates use “jargon” to bully gun-control supporters. “While debating the merits of various gun control proposals,” he contends, “Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology.”

How dare Second Amendment advocates expect that those passionately arguing to limit their constitutional rights might have some rudimentary knowledge of the devices they want to ban? To point out the constant glaring technical and policy “faux pas” of gun controllers is to engage in “gunsplaining,” a bad-faith argument akin to intimidation.

“If you don’t know what the ‘AR’ in AR-15 stands for, you don’t get to talk” explains the sarcastic subhead. If you don’t know what the “AR” in AR-15 stands you still get to talk. But if you want to ban or confiscate AR-15s and you haven’t taken the time to learn what the AR stands for, then gun owners have every right to call you out.

Weinstein bemoans the unfairness of gun controllers “being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions between our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons.” This statement is illustrative of the emotionalism and hyperbole of the debate (the notion that there’s an “unlimited variety” of firearms is absurd) but also, at the same time, it’s an exaggeration of the Second Amendment advocate’s expectations.

Like with any contemporary disputes over public policy, there will always be those who attempt to dismiss opponents who possess less expertise. It’s certainly not unique to this debate. And no, simply because a person refers to a “bullet” rather than a “cartridge” or “clip” rather than a “magazine” should not mean exclusion from conversation.

Then again, much of gun-control policy is driven by the mechanics of a firearm. So while not knowing what a “barrel shroud” is should not prevent anyone from pondering gun policy (well, unless you’re a politician who goes on TV to advocate the banning of barrel shrouds without knowing what they are) but failing to understand the distinction between a semi-automatic and automatic weapon tells us you’re either dishonest, unserious or unprepared for the debate.

So, for instance, Michael Bloomberg.

In a debate imbued with emotion, gun-control advocates rely on this ignorance. When Barack Obama tells a crowd that a mass shooter used a “fully automatic weapon,” he’s not concerned with the finest taxonomic distinctions of a gun, he’s depending on the yawning obliviousness of a cheering crowd. When CNN featured an alleged gun expert explaining that the AR-15 he’s about to fire is “full semi-automatic,” he’s making the functionality of firearm sound scarier to those who are ignorant about guns.

“Jargon” are words and expressions that are difficult for a layman to understand or use. Rather than use jargon, Second Amendment advocates are usually mocking those who use jargon-y sounding words in efforts to fearmonger viewers and constituents. When you claim that the streets are rife with “high-capacity, rapid-fire magazines” or “jumbo clips” you’re trying to fool your audience with a veneer of expertise you don’t possess. When you claim that we need to ban “gas-assisted, receiver firearms” you’re trying to make a semi-automatic weapon sound like a machine gun for a reason.

It’s not always the mechanics, either. When Joe Scarborough misrepresents the Heller decision, he’s preying on policy ignorance that has little to do with gun culture. When Steve Schmidt goes on television and passionately tells an audience that it’s more difficult to buy cough medicine than an “AK-47 – or 50 of them,” he’s either lying or he has absolutely no grasp of how gun policy works. Either way, he shouldn’t be talking to grownups about firearms.

All these people use a moralistic fallacy, which is often predicated on the ignorance Weinstein rationalizes. Not that it stops him from embracing the appeal to authority he condemns elsewhere.

For example, Weinstein takes Fox News personality Tomi Lahren to task for failing to mention that “the family” of Eugene Stoner, the AR-15’s designer and champion, claimed in 2016 that the inventor would be “horrified and sickened to see his military rifle pattern become so common in civilian households and school shootings.” You’ll notice the conflation. Of course Stoner would be horrified that his gun was used in school shootings. But Weinstein fails to note that there’s no evidence anywhere on the record that Stoner was “horrified and sickened” by the notion of civilians owning his gun. Since he was selling proto AR-15s to civilians a decade before his military model was adopted by the United States, we have no reason to believe he would be.

Perhaps that kind of discussion spurns conversation in favor of condescension. But at least it’s a debate that revolves around the veracity of facts. Which is a lot more I can say for the rest of the “gunsplaining” grievance.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the forthcoming book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

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The NRA and its allies use jargon to bully gun-control supporters
If you don’t know what the “AR” in AR-15 stands for, you don’t get to talk.
By Adam Weinstein March 6

The phenomenon isn’t new, but in the weeks since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a lot of gun-skeptical liberals are getting a taste of it for the first time: While debating the merits of various gun control proposals, Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology. Perhaps someone tweets about “assault-style” weapons, only to be told that there’s no such thing. Maybe they’re reprimanded that an AR-15 is neither an assault rifle nor “high-powered.” Or they say something about “machine guns” when they really mean semiautomatic rifles. Or they get sucked into an hours-long Facebook exchange over the difference between a “clip” and a “magazine.”

Has this happened to you? If so, you’ve been gunsplained: harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control.

It can be infuriating, being forced to sweat the finest taxonomic distinctions among our nation’s unlimited variety of lethal weapons. I know this feeling acutely, having covered gun violence critically for the better part of a decade and having just buried an old mentor, killed in the Parkland massacre.

Pointing out terminological firearms faux pas has its place. As a lifelong shooter and a third-generation gun collector, I grew up watching pundits and politicos regularly betray their ignorance of these hazardous tools and the culture that surrounds them. Advocates of tighter gun laws have bandied the phrase “assault weapon” around as if it were a static category of insidious killers; they defined an assault weapon, in law, by its cosmetic add-ons — pistol grips, collapsible stocks, bayonet lugs — while overstating the role these weapons play in overall gun crime in America. (According to 2010-2014 FBI data, rifles of all types, including assault weapons, caused less than 4 percent of all firearms deaths in the U.S. Handguns caused 70 percent.) Gun-control advocates have even acknowledged at times that assault weapons are hard to define, and thus easy to vilify among the uninitiated.

If only these adversaries were a little more honest, I’ve often thought, and more precise in their language on the subject, we could have a serious debate on the finer points of gun violence policy, instead of a bad-faith propaganda race.

Gunsplaining, though, is always done in bad faith. Like mansplaining, it’s less about adding to the discourse than smothering it — with self-appointed authority, and often the thinnest of connection to any real fact. (If gunsplaining had a motto, it might be Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s macabre old saw: “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”)

For an example, look to Dana Loesch, the conservative shock jock turned paid spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, who represented the gun lobby’s perspective at a live televised town hall last month with survivors of the Parkland shooting.

There, the mother of a teacher who died protecting his students from gunfire asked Loesch: How could she possibly believe the Founding Fathers, who ratified the Second Amendment in 1791, anticipated legal AR-15s?

“At the time,” Loesch replied, “there were fully automatic weapons that were available — the Belton gun and Puckle gun.”

I’m writing a book on the Belton gun and can safely say her argument is bunk: Both the Belton and the Puckle required an operator to fire each shot with an individual pull of the trigger, then manually cock the gun’s action to fire each successive shot. This is known as “single action,” and it’s about as far from “fully automatic” as a firearm gets. Modern automatic arms can fire upward of 100 rounds per minute with a single, sustained trigger pull — sometimes more; the Puckle and the Belton “repeaters,” with an adept operator cycling their actions under the best conditions, could perhaps fire a shot every five to 10 seconds.

But here was the NRA’s top voice in a time of tragedy, defending AR-15 ownership as a bedrock constitutional right by name-checking two 18th-century manually operated flintlocks — quite incorrectly — as “fully automatic weapons.”

If, in the course of advocating for stricter gun laws, a Democrat, cable-news personality or Hollywood activist had called a flintlock a machine gun, the NRA would have hustled out a fundraising appeal to its members that same day with a video clip of the offending remark prominently embedded in the email. Instead, it’s given its own spokeswoman a pass. Loesch is gunsplaining even though she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

More recently, Tomi Lahren, a Fox News personality with no obvious qualifications, preemptively tweet-lectured “Lefties” that the “AR” in AR-15 doesn’t stand for “assault rifle” but for the name of the gun’s original manufacturer, Armalite. She failed to note that the family of Eugene Stoner, Armalite’s onetime chief engineer and the brains behind the AR-15, insisted in 2016 that he would be “horrified and sickened” to see his military rifle pattern become so common in civilian households and school shootings.

Lahren’s tweet is bad-faith gunsplaining par excellence. Its point is not to foster deeper understanding of these weapons, but to further a group identity of firearms owners as beset by a dumb or dishonest adversary, to flatter their insecurities and tell them they don’t need to take gun controllers seriously because you can’t reason with ignorance.

In this kind of war over words, both sides probably need to give a little. But the pro-gun side needs to give a lot more — not just because it’s been disingenuously gunsplaining to shut down discussions and close minds for years — but because the onus should be on those citizens who own the weapons technology, and purport to understand it, to share that understanding with the skeptical and less-informed. That’s a responsibility that goes along with the right to bear arms.

There are truly meaningful gun-terminology discussions we could be having right now. Civil libertarians who worry about excessive force and police-involved shootings, for example, have a huge stake in understanding how seemingly technical options in police handguns — single action vs. double action, or hammer- vs. striker-fired — affect gun-discharge rates.

And yes, a growing number of American gun owners, including me, find “assault weapons” easier to define, and harder to defend, with time. I know that an AR-15 is not a machine gun or an assault rifle, that its rounds are not high-powered, that it accepts magazines, not clips — any law that seeks to ban them should be written with precision. But I also know that it, or a weapon patterned after it, was used in Aurora, Colo.; Newtown, Conn.; Las Vegas; San Bernardino, Calif.; Orlando; Sutherland Springs, Tex.; and Parkland. Whatever the causes — media sensationalism, marketing, “tacticool” military mimicry, easy availability — this rifle and its relatives are clearly go-tos for a certain kind of American-bred killer. That’s worth at least addressing in a public policy forum, even if the pro-gun camp continues to suppress debate with heavy rhetorical firepower, instead of just shooting straight.

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Disambiguation
3/20/2018 11:15 PM EDT
This is brilliant! If someone demands that I stick to the facts I can accuse them of Truthsplaining! If they claim I used a semicolon incorrectly I can complain that they are Punctuationsplaining! Should they point out that a term I use doesn't mean what I think it does then they are Wordsplaining! I never have to worry about being correct, concise, or convincing again! Just toss the suffix -splaining at the end of whatever I'm accused of and bang (so to speak), that'll show them!

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dafrazi said:

What defines a "high-powered" round?

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dafrazi said:

The .223 round is a .222 to me. I know they are different. I don't when it rounded up but when I started shooting them, it was .222 (triple deuce); so, for me it will always be a .222.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Remington...look to the right Parent Case: .222 Remington.

I think the term "high-powered" has probably been defined by some regulatory body. My guess is, it is related to kinetic energy at some distance. I'll have to look it up at home since this kind of information query is blocked at work.

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vreihen said:

I saw videos of this idiot on the NYC TV news today, and it certainly looked like a gun to me from the way he was brandishing it on pedestrians.....

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/york-attorney-general-opens-probe-police-shooting-man-154603461--abc-news-topstories.html

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South Carolina congressman draws gun at constituent meeting

Associated Press
April 7, 2018

ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) -- A South Carolina congressman pulled out his own loaded handgun during a meeting with constituents Friday to make a point that guns are dangerous only in the hands of criminals.

Republican U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman placed the .38-caliber gun on a table during the "coffee with constituents" meeting at a Rock Hill restaurant, news outlets reported.

"I'm not going to be a Gabby Giffords," Norman said, referring to the former Arizona congresswoman who was shot outside a grocery store during a constituent gathering in 2011.

Giffords' husband, retired NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, said in a statement that Norman is "no Gabby Giffords" and noted that his wife has dedicated her life to ending gun violence.

"Americans are increasingly faced with a stark choice: leaders like Gabby, who work hard together to find solutions to problems, or extremists like the NRA and Congressman Norman, who rely on intimidation tactics and perpetuating fear," Kelly said.

Norman said he'll display his gun at future constituent meetings.

"I'm tired of these liberals jumping on the guns themselves as if they are the cause of the problem," Norman told The Post and Courier. "Guns are not the problem."

School teacher Lori Carter of Charlotte, North Carolina, said she thought the move was contradictory because Norman didn't know if someone there had mental health issues.

"What was to prevent me from leaning across the table to take that gun?" she said.

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A trio of state House Republicans on Thursday quietly introduced a bill that would allow lawmakers to debate seceding from the U.S. if the federal government confiscates guns purchased in South Carolina.

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Claridge introduces ballistic panels for educational interior environments

PRESS RELEASE
04/13/2018
Claridge Products

Pioneering visual display and writing surface manufacturer Claridge Products today announced the launch of PRO-TACT® Ballistic Barriers, an extensive range of bullet-resistant, modular, space-dividing panels for public spaces where increased safety is required, according Claridge marketing director Kurt James.

“PRO-TACT Ballistic Barriers provide a level of enhanced safety that bridges the gap between body armor and structural blast protection,” James said. “And they’re as unobtrusive as any commercial office dividers.”

Designed for secure environments such as military installations and recruitment centers, airports, worship centers, courtrooms and schools, PRO-TACT Ballistic Barriers integrate discreetly into any interior environment while providing enhanced protection for a building’s occupants and visitors.

PRO-TACT panels are available in stationary and mobile versions, meet ASTM E-84 Class A and have been GREENGUARD-Certified for indoor air quality. Both the stationary and mobile models (and all joint connections in the stationary model) are UL 752 Level 7 and 8 listed and independently tested to NIJ Level 3. For certain ballistic materials, UL 7 presents a greater threat than either UL 8 or NIJ3, so Claridge chose to achieve dual UL listings.

All PRO-TACT Ballistic Barriers are bi-directional and contain a high-hardness steel core coated with 100% polyurea elastomer to lessen ricochet, spall and splatter. Stationary panels are available in standard heights and widths ranging from 4’ (H) x 2’ (W) to 6’ (H) x 4’ (W); mobile panels in heights and widths from 4' (H) x 3’ (W) to 6' (H) x 4' (W). Finished surface options include porcelain enamel steel markerboard or Designer Series Fabric tackable surfaces in a choice of 10 colors.

About Claridge Products

Since its founding in 1947, Claridge Products has grown to be one of the world’s largest and most respected woman-owned makers of US-made visual display solutions. The company was instrumental in guiding and influencing the collaborative process, and today, some 70 years later, Claridge serves and supports a wide range of customers in specialties ranging from architectural design and construction to business, K-12 education, healthcare, higher education, and other industries.

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vreihen said:

Something for the architects to consider using when Ross-Tech does the blueprints for HQ2?????

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