From:	[N M PX 21 A] at [prodigy.com] (PAUL D QUESNELL)
To:	[C--I] at [aol.com]
Date: 96-01-30 23:37:09 EST

- -- [ From: Paul Quesnell * EMC.Ver #2.5.03 ] --

Copyright 1995 by Reason Foundation. 

ETonso, William, Shooting blind., Vol. 27, Reason, 11-01-1995, pp. 30.

By William R. Tonso William R. Tonso ([BT 24] at [evansville.edu]) is a
professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, Criminal Justice
, and Pre-Social Work at the University of Evansville.  
============================= 
Press coverage of the "assault weapon" controversy suggests that most
journalists know very little about guns--and are not interested in
learning. 

In a September 1988 report on "assault weapons" that he prepared for the
Education Fund to End Handgun Violence, gun control advocate Josh
Sugarmann candidly observed: "The 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. In addition, few people can
envision a practical use for these guns." 

So back in 1988, one of the nation's leading gun prohibitionists was
banking on public support for restrictions on "semi-automatic assault
weapons," not because Americans were informed about the guns in question
, but because they were uninformed and likely to remain so. Sugarmann,
now executive director of the Violence Policy Center, could rely on the
public's continuing confusion because he knew he would have the help of
the nation's leading news organizations. During the next few years the
major TV networks, newspapers, and magazines persistently misled the
public about the capabilities of "assault weapons," falsely implied that
the guns have no legitimate use, and ignored the Second Amendment issues
at stake. Given the intensity of this misinformation, it is hardly
surprising that polls find some 70 percent of Americans support the
"assault weapon" ban approved by Congress last year. 

Many members of the current Congress, including Senate Majority Leader
Bob Dole, favor repealing the ban, although that effort was put on hold
in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing. In reporting on the continuing
controversy, the national press routinely cites strong public support
for the ban. The lead of an April 6 story in The New York Times is
typical: "A group of House Republicans plans to introduce legislation on
Thursday to repeal last year's ban on assault weapons, even as national
polls continue to show that a majority of Americans favor it." Having
whipped up hysteria about "assault weapons," journalists now point to
the results of their alarmist reporting as evidence that they were right
all along. Although big journalism's misleading coverage of this issue
can be partly explained by a combination of ignorance and arrogance, it
seems clear that hostility toward the right to keep and bear arms has
played an important role. 

>From the beginning, stories about "assault weapons" blurred the
distinction between semi-automatics and machine guns. Machine guns are
automatics: They fire as long as the trigger is held back. The
possession of such firearms has been strictly regulated by the federal
government since 1934. They have long been banned in some states, and no
new automatics have legally entered civilian circulation in the United
States since 1986. But semi-automatics, regardless of how much some of
them may look like machine guns, fire one shot per trigger pull.
Civilians have commonly used them for recreation and self-defense since
the turn of the century.
 
<<SNIP>>

The level of ignorance about basic gun facts among reporters should not
be underestimated. Consider a July 10 article from the Associated Press
that appeared in the Chicago Tribune under the headline, "Use of Assault
Guns Rising Among Youth, U.S. Says." The story describes a report from
the Bureau of Justice Statistics on the use of guns in crime and notes
that "the report comes while the Republican-controlled Congress is
considering legislation to eliminate the 1994 federal ban on 19 assault
weapons." Yet despite the headline and the reference to the ban, the
findings cited in the story say nothing about the use of"assault weapons
." Rather, they indicate "a growing trend toward use of semiautomatic
pistols," a category that includes all handguns except revolvers and one
- - or two-shot weapons. 

Still, ignorance alone cannot explain big joumalism's treatment of the
"assault weapon" issue during the past decade. Newsweek helped launch
the "assault weapon" scare three years before Sugarmann's report with a
1985 cover story rifled, "Machine Gun USA." While the article
acknowledged the difference between semi-automatics and machine guns, it
implied that the former could be converted into the latter so easily
that the difference was of little significance. The story was
accompanied by illustrations of several semi-automatic versions of
automatic weapons, with captions that cited the much higher firing rates
of the automatics. 

<<SNIP>>

Indeed, big journalism's coverage of "assault weapons" has seldom noted
that the guns so labeled fire cartridges commonly used for recreation
and self-defense. Quite the contrary. More often than not, the coverage
has claimed that these guns are extraordinarily powerful. Some
journalists have even resorted to fakery to support this false claim.
According to sources in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, shortly
after the 1989 Stockton schoolyard attack, a reporter and photographer
from the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner asked a deputy to
demonstrate AK-47 power by shooting a watermelon with one. The deputy
replied that a gun firing the full-metal-jacketed, military ammunition
used at Stockton would simply put a hole in the melon, and that is
exactly what happened when he shot it. The reporter then asked the
deputy to shoot a melon with his pistol, which he did. Though far less
powerful than the rifle, his 9mm pistol fired an expanding hollow-point
slug that splattered the melon impressively. Both the puncturing of a
melon by the more-powerful rifle and the splattering of a melon by the
less-powerful pistol were captured on film. The Herald Examiner then
published the photograph of the splattered melon--but credited the rifle
. 

About that time, splattered-watermelon demonstrations started appearing
on KABC in Los Angeles and other California stations as well as on the
national news, but the connection to the Herald Examiner fakery, if any,
is not clear. It is possible that some of these TV demonstrations were
honest. As gun control opponent Neal Knox has shown in a Gun Owners of
America video, military-style 7.62x39mm slugs fired from an AK-47 can
splatter a watermelon, apparently depending on the melon's ripeness and
other variables. Even if these TV splatterings were actually produced by
AK-47s, however, the demonstrations were still deceptive unless they
also showed what ordinary guns will do to a melon, as an ABC News
special did on January 24, 1990. While ABC showed an AK-47 putting
baseball-sized holes in watermelons and the Gun Owners of America video
featured splattering fruit, both demonstrations also showed common
sporting guns vaporizing watermelons. 

Despite their destructive capability, no one is calling for a ban on
sporting weapons, because hunting and target shooting are still widely
considered acceptable reasons for owning a gun. By contrast, military-
style semi-automatics are said to be fit only for drag dealers and mass
murderers. Yet police figures show that "assault weapons" are rarely
used in crimes, and such guns have a number of legitimate civilian uses
that could be easily discovered by any journalist curious enough to look
for them. 

Tough American shooters were not immediately attracted by the non-
traditional appearance of these otherwise fairly unremarkable guns,
their durability and, ironically, their media-generated notoriety have
helped increase interest in them. For the first time in our history,
American troops are equipped with rifles of a type (automatic or burst-
fire) difficult or (in some states) impossible for civilians to own
legally. Hence, civilians interested in the military-style rifle matches
long supported by the federal government have to use semi-automatic-only
variations of our recent and current military rifles. Many farmers and
ranchers in sparsely settled areas have accepted certain models of these
light but durable military-style semi-automatics as varmint and utility
rifles. Boaters off the coast of Florida, wary of armed drag runners,
also seem to have acquired an interest in such guns, and so have
collectors and hobbyists. In other words, it is demonstrably false that
civilians have no practical, sporting, or recreational uses for these
military-style semi-automatics. 

But the most important reason American civilians should have access to
these guns has nothing to do with recreation or even with defense
against criminals. It has to do with the main purpose of the Second
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an aspect of the "assault weapon"
story that the national press has almost completely ignored. The Second
Amendment states: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed." This amendment is seldom even mentioned in
establishment news coverage of the gun issue, even though it is the main
source of opposition to gun controls. With the exceptions of 1983 PBS
and 1993 A&E documentaries, a May 22, 1995, U.S. News & World Report
article, and a few conservative, libertarian, and populist columnists,
what little journalistic commentary that does mention the amendment
almost invariably claims that its meaning is unclear, that it is
outdated and should be repealed, or that it protects only the right of
the National Guard to possess guns. 

But the meaning of the Second Amendment is very clear to the vast
majority of scholars who have examined the paper trail left by the
Founders. James Madison's friend Tench Coxe expressed their concerns
succinctly in 1789: "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the
people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military
forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might
pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people
are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their
private arms." 

The Founders also made it clear that the "militia" consisted of the
whole armed people. The Federalist Papers and other writings indicate
that they feared large professional military forces and select militias 
(like the National Guard). Citizens and their privately owned guns were
part of the system of checks and balances that the Founders felt was
necessary to keep government from drifting into tyranny. Authors of the
50 law review articles that support this interpretation include such
prominent, liberal, non-gun-owning scholars as Sanford Levinson of the
University of Texas, Akhil R. Amar of Yale, and William Van Alstyne of
Duke. 

According to Title 10, Section 311 of the U.S. Code, the National Guard
is still only the organized part of a militia that consists of
practically all able-bodied males and some females between the ages of
17 and 45 who are citizens of the United States or have declared an
intention to become citizens. The only 20th-century Supreme Court ruling
touching on the Second Amendment (U.S.v. Miller, 1939) acknowledged that
militiamen called to service "were expected to appear bearing arms
supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time". In
1939, American troops were equipped with semi-automatic pistols and were
being equipped with semi-automatic rifles. Now our troops are equipped
with less-powerful but higher-magazine-capacity semi-automatic pistols
and less-powerful but burst-fire and higher-magazine-capacity rifles. 

American citizens have traditionally had access to rifles and pistols
with more power and magazine capacity than those issued to common
soldiers. In keeping with the traditional American view of the militia,
the Army's Office of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship has long sold
surplus pistols, rifles, and carbines, including semi-automatics, to the
public at bargain-basement prices. No one claims that Americans have
caused problems with these surplus military small arms. Yet since common
soldiers started carrying automatic or burst-fire rifles, American
citizens have no longer had access to up-to-date military small arms,
and federal law now even restricts their access to semi-automatic
variations of these guns. So not only do we have the large professional
military and select militia that the Founders feared, but there is a
movement afoot to get militarily effective small arms out of civilian
hands. 

Big journalism has not examined the implications of these developments,
instead treating the Second Amendment as, at best, an anachronism. In a
March 1990 column titled "The Second Amendment Gets No Respect," Mike
Moore, then editor of The Quill, the magazine of the Society of
Professional Journalists, wrote that "in 30 years in the business it's
hard to imagine a subject . . . that has inspired more poor reporting
and silly editorial commentary." As I've suggested, much of that poor
reporting and silly commentary is the result of ignorance. Ted Gest of U
.S. News & World Report acknowledged in a 1992 Media Studies Journal
article that few of today's journalists know much about guns. In an
article introducing USA Today's extended examination of the gun issue at
the end of 1993, Tony Mauro wrote that in his paper's news-room, "which
prides itself on drawing its staff from a cross section of the nation,
it was hard to find editors and reporters who had ever pulled a trigger.
" 

But if ignorance explains sloppy reporting and commentary on the gun
issue that has been going on for decades, journalists don't seem
interested in overcoming that ignorance by learning about guns and the
legitimate uses to which they are put by millions of Americans. Moreover
, since journalistic misinformation on guns invariably favors the gun
prohibitionists, something more than ignorance must be involved. 

All but a few leading columnists and editors of major newspapers have
taken a strong stand in support of stricter gun controls. Guns are also
unpopular among the higher-ups at broad-cast-news organizations. Michael
Gartner, before he was sacked as president of NBC News over the GM-truck
scam, used a guest column in USA Today to call for repeal of the Second
Amendment. 

Journalists have long maintained that they keep their personal views in
check when they engage in reporting as opposed to commentary. But some
prominent journalists are no longer trying to maintain that fiction when
covering the gun issue. Where guns are concerned, it seems, they seek
only premise-supporting evidence. And big journalism's working premise
is that the battle over gun control pits the American public, its police
protectors, and its responsible representatives, aided by neutral
researchers and the watchdog press, against the "gun lobby," headed by
the NRA and representing no more than the gun industry and other
irresponsible vested interests. 

Thus in 1989 Bill Peters, correspondent for Los Angeles's ABC-owned
station, told the U.S. Senate that "today it is our [journalists']
responsibility--using all the powerful means we have at our disposal . .
. both to inform the public of the danger to society posed by military
assault rifles and to help build support for getting rid of them."
Gloria Hammond, of Time's editorial office, informed readers who
complained of bias,in that magazine's July 17, 1989, cover story on guns
that "the time for opinions on the dangers of gun availability is long
since gone, replaced by overwhelming evidence that it represents a
growing threat to public safety." 

Thomas Winship, a former editor of the Boston Globe who now chairs the
Center for Foreign Journalists in Reston, Virginia, called for a
newspaper crusade against guns in his April 24, 1993, Editor & Publisher
column. He urged editors, who he assumed share his anti-gun views, to
"investigate the NRA with renewed vigor. . . . Print names of elected
officials who take NRA funds. . . . Support all forms of gun licensing;
in fact all the causes NRA opposes." 

Back in 1988, Josh Sugarmann accurately read big journalism. He and his
friends did not have to worry that skeptical, hard-hitting reporting
would discredit their cause. When it comes to gun control, big
journalism is little more than a purveyor of the conventional wisdom
among urban sophisticates who have only a selective appreciation for the
Bill of Rights.