Here is the Single Dumbest Anti-Gun Article Evah!

-By Warner Todd Huston

So, imagine an article that claims to list the “top five” most “dangerous guns in America” that essentially lists every gun ever made then stuffs its descriptions full of factually incorrect statements about gun history and simple reality and you’ll have the dumbest list yet to appear on the extremist left-wing Rolling Stone website.

The piece written by hack writer Kristen Gwynne and posted on July 14 purports to list “The 5 Most Dangerous Guns in America,” and promises to inform readers of the firearms “causing the most harm.”

Now, this description and title would make one think that Rolling Stone might about to be listing which particular models are dangerous. like, maybe a the AR-15, or the… well, a particular model, anyway.

Firstly we must point out the obvious, logical point: NO firearm is dangerous unless someone picks it up and fires it.

But let’s start on page one. The number one “most dangerous gun” is listed as “pistols.”

So, um, what? All of them?

Pistols are described thus: “Popular among handgun-owners, pistols are defined by their built-in barrel and short stock.”

What gun doesn’t have a “built-in-barrel”? And pistols don’t have “stocks.” Rifles do. Pistols have handles or grips.

The next “most dangerous” is “Revolvers.”

Wait, revolvers aren’t “pistols”?

The third “most dangerous” gun is “Rifles.”

Again, all of them?

Here is the inept description of “the” gun “rifles”:

“Rifles were created to improve the accuracy of smoothbore muskets, for which the musket ball was often an bad fit due to manufacturing complications. Accurate and easy-to-aim, rifles are now the most common hunting weapon.”

That is all kinds of incorrect. A smoothbore musket had no “manufacturing complications” in its projectile. Smoothbores were just less accurate than a rifled gun because the bullet was smaller than the bore which made its trajectory unpredictable when fired. But it had nothing to do with any “manufacturing complications.” It had to do with technology! It turned out that scientifically the rifled barrel simply delivered better accuracy and once everyone figured that out and devised reliable ways to manufacture the rifle, the smoothbore went by the way side as an outdated technology.

Further, the long arm was always the most popular hunting weapon. There is no “now” involved in that question. It hasn’t been sudden. It’s been true for hundreds of years.

The next most dangerous gun is “Shotguns.”

Oddly, Rolling Stone seems to think that only rifles have “metallic cartridges.” But, that aside, listen to this absurdly fashioned sentence…

“Additionally, the explosive that creates the energy to fire the gun occurs in the fixed shell of a shotgun rather than the metallic cartridge of a rifle.”

That sounded like a 13-year-old reading his badly written report to the class, didn’t it?

The next “most dangerous gun” is the ever popular “Derringers.”

So, let’s recap all these “most dangerous guns in America.”

1). Pistols
2). Revolvers
3). Rifles
4). Shotguns
5). Derringers

So, essentially that is every gun in the world because no matter what you have it’s either a pistol or a rifle and since derringers and revolvers are both pistols one wonders why this list isn’t just “the two most dangerous weapons in America”?

This “list” is un-informative, misleading, and just plain stupid. But lets use this as an example for other lists, shall we?

The 5 Most Dangerous Cars in America
1). Ford
2). GM
3). Chevy
4). Toyota
5). Volkswagen

The 5 Most Dangerous Roads in America
1). Streets
2). Avenues
3). Highways
4). Roads
5). Parkways

The 5 Most Dangerous Buildings in America
1). Brick buildings
2). Steel buildings
3). Wooden buildings
4). Concrete buildings
5). Rock buildings

The 5 Most Dangerous Types of Waters in America
1). Ponds
2). Streams
3). Rivers
4). Lakes
5). Oceans

Well, you get the picture.
____________
“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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