The big front page story on CNN.com yesterday was a story saying Florida cops are having to deal more assault weapons and tries to link it to the lapse of the assault weapons ban. The problem is, the reporter keep referring to the criminals having fully-automatic weapons that were smuggled in from former Soviet bloc countries, i.e., actual assault weapons, which as you all know has nothing to do the assault weapons ban which only banned certain types of semi-automatic weapons, i.e., not assault weapons.

Now, police officers having to deal with smuggled AK-47s is certainly a story, but the reporters made this one complete crap by trying to tie that in with a bill that absolutely nothing to do with anything else mentioned in the story. I know it's kind of confusing (it's like a bill that makes jay walking a felony being called the "Anti-Pedophile Bill" and when you strike it down every proclaims "Now pedophiles are going to flood the streets!"), but it says this article was written by Susan Candiotti with Patrick Oppmann, Rich Phillips, and Ann O'Neill contributing, and we're supposed to believe that of the four of them reporting on a story about the so-called assault weapons ban, none of them new it had nothing to do with automatic weapons. That's makes them all either extremely ignorant of the agenda they were pushing or extremely dishonest.

I don't even know how to pester these people into writing a correction -- or just not writing crap -- but if I did, I would. Maybe we should pass a five day waiting period on writing ignorant, agenda-driven stories about guns so people have time to think about what they're doing. If a waiting period on buying firearms isn't unconstitutional, then a waiting period on speech certainly isn't. Let's see if after five days the reporters still believe they want to be that dishonest and stupid.

UPDATE:

A lot of people are pointing out this quote from the story:

Designed to shoot from the hip, fully automatic assault rifles such as the AK-47 can spray at a rate of up to 600 rounds a minute.

Now, I've never fired a fully-automatic weapon (they were $25 to rent at a range I've gone to at Idaho; who has that kind of money), but is it even possible to fire a fully-auto assault rifle without bracing it against your shoulder? I'm looking at you, veterans; do something useful for once and answer my question.

Do you think these reporters use action movies as a research tool?

UPDATE 2:

Consensus seems to be that while fully automatic rifles can be fired from the hip, it only works as inaccurate suppressive fire and aren't what they're "designed" for. Also, with 30-rd magazines, it won't last very long at that rate of fire (which is why suppressive fire is more seen with belt fed machine guns).

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