It seems that early reports of the Navy Yard murderer having an AR-15 or a rifle of any kind were all wrong. Also very wrong is a report by the New York Times, repeated on CBS and possibly other outlets, that the killer attempted to buy an "assault rifle" at a Virginia gun store but was rejected. I repeat, this is not true.
Miller explains:
The Times has a story Tuesday on its homepage with the headline “State Law Stopped Gunman From Buying Rifle, Officials Say.”The leftist media is so intent on making this a story about evil guns that they will write anything that even vaguely suggests that their evasive, unicorn-like assault weapons were involved. They are as delusional as the poor people who think they have been abducted by aliens.
The first line says: “The gunman who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday test fired an AR-15 assault rifle at a Virginia gun store last week but was stopped from buying one because state law there prohibits the sale of such weapons to out-of-state buyers, according to two senior law enforcement officials.”
Apparently neither the reporter nor his editors took the time to fact check their vague “law enforcement officials” sources.
“Virginia law does not prohibit the sale of assault rifles to out-of-state citizens who have proper identification,” Dan Peterson, a Virginia firearms attorney, told me Tuesday night. The required identification is proof of residency in another state and of U.S. citizenship, which can be items like a passport, birth certificate or voter identification card.
More from Miller:
While it is true that Alexis rented and shot an AR-type rifle at Sharpshooters Small Arms Range in Lorton, sources close to the investigation tell me that he did not attempt to buy the rifle.The use of a shotgun could be a reason for the high death toll of 12 (not counting the murderer) relative to the eight victim who were wounded but survived.
Instead, he passed both the federal and state background checks and bought a Remington 870 shotgun and 30 shotgun shells (00 buckshot), which he used, tragically, to kill 12 innocent people.
As Miller points out, there are already thousands of gun laws on the books. None of those laws will stop a madman. Further, as Wayne LaPierre said back in the '90s, if we were serious we would enforce the laws we have. Enforcing the law regarding discharging a firearm, reckless endangerment, destruction of property, and, probably, assault, in Seattle in 2004 would have prevented the murderer from legally owning firearms and would have kept him from having a security clearance. I would hope, anyway. That might have prevented this horrific loss of life. Yet another gun law would not have done so.
Thanks for clearing that up. We had heard that VA gun laws prevented the AR-15 from being purchased. Come to think about it, why would he be able to get a shotgun and not an AR-15?
ReplyDeleteSo much misinformation. Has the news always been this bad and we now have the internet to do rapid, independent verification? (I dunno, just speculating, I'm too lazy to find out.)
News has always had an agenda. Papers were partisan and reveled in it. Broadcast media, because of "public" ownership of the airwaves, was always supposed to be more balanced, so there were things like the very stupid Fairness Doctrine.
ReplyDeletePeople like Cronkite never admitted their bias, and I saw first hand a couple of times how a local TV station could present a radically bias report while claiming it aired both sides.
The old blonde chick who is on PBS now -- can't remember her name, but I think she used to be on CNN -- was talking about media bias on Frontline one time. She swore that they were "objective" then in the next sentence admitted that journalists were by definition "activists". She, like most of her kind, was too stupid to recognize the contradiction.