-By Warner Todd Huston
Once again we get proof of how mindless and clueless the media is, how they don’t fact check, but just mindlessly pass on each other’s bad work ad infinitum. This time it happened with a story about a criminal who used a .22 caliber pistol in a crime but one clueless reporter turned it into a “submachine gun” and hundreds of his mindless colleagues followed suit passing the lie on and on and on.
Clueless reporter Darryl Holliday of DNAinfo Chicago, a website that caters to local news, reported on an incident that was perpetrated by a man from West Garfield Park who began wielding a .22 caliber pistol in a grocery store because he didn’t want to pay the 22 cents tax on a bottle of pop he was trying to buy.
Holliday “reported” that the crook “pulled an Intratec submachine gun out of a Gucci satchel,” and in the next paragraph again claimed the piece was a “submachine gun” saying, “Officers arrived on the scene shortly after to find Shelton’s Gucci bag open on the counter as well as 15 bullets in the blue steel .22-caliber submachine gun–eight live rounds in one magazine, five in another and one in the chamber, according to court documents.”
Of course, it is clear that reporter Holliday doesn’t have any idea what he’s rambling on about. The .22 caliber Intratec pistol is not a “submachine gun. It is a semi-automatic pistol like every other semi-auto pistol.
A submachine gun is an automatic rifle that uses pistol cartridges instead of larger ones such as rifle or armor piercing cartridges. A one-hand-held version of this weapon is called a “machine pistol,” but it is also fully automatic.
The Intratec pistol used in this crime is not a fully automatic weapon, however. It is semi-auto-meaning it fires only once when the trigger is pulled. It does not expel a stream of bullets like a fully automatic weapon does.
Yet, as soon as this story went live on April 13, dozens of other so-called news outlets took up the claim that this dolt used a “submachine gun” in his crime.
All one need do is put “Nahshon Shelton submachine gun” in any search engine and dozens of so-called news stories will be revealed saying that the criminal used a “submachine gun.”
It all just shows that whenever you see a report on guns in the Old Media establishment, you should not trust it. They don’t even know the proper definitions of firearms terms and from there all their “facts” are suspect.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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