Our side continues to produce so much great information — the problem is, not nearly enough of it reaches those fellow citizens of ours that need to hear it. Here is Selwyn Duke writing at American Thinker:
Hi, my name is AR-15. Some of you know me, but many more of you know of me — through the media. But you may not know the real me.
I’m that cool, sleek-looking black gun you’ve seen profiled by the press. They put me in newspapers and on TV, showing my picture as if it’s a mug shot, even though I’ve never committed a crime. Oh, bad people have at times used (and abused) me to do bad things, but not really that often; as even The New York Times admitted in 2014, firearms such as me — which that paper and others call “assault weapons” — are only used in two percent of gun crimes (most are perpetrated with handguns).
And that’s another thing. For a long time I didn’t mind the misnomer; it massaged my ego and made me feel like the big man on the block when I was called an “assault weapon.” But Mr. Duke convinced me that “pride goeth before a fall,” as the Good Book says. He pointed out that the term “assault weapon” was popularized by anti-gun zealot Josh Sugarmann, whose goal was to besmirch my reputation and get me banned. In fact, Sugarmann, not at all a sweet man, actually once said, “Assault weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”
And it’s true, especially in my case. The public knows my appearance well; people have seen my cousin and dead ringer, M-16, fired machine-gun style in war movies for decades. But, alas, I, AR-15 — the weapon available to the public — can only be fired semi-automatic. This means that every time you pull my trigger, one shot, and only one shot, is released.
So even if we accept the term “assault weapon,” that’s not me. To qualify, a gun must be capable of fully automatic fire (machine-gun style), and no such weapons are readily available to the public. So unlike cousin M-16, who originally had a select-fire feature allowing him to be shot in various ways, I’m just a one-trick pony.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: Wikipedia.