The Evolution of Gun Control Vocabulary (updated)

UPDATE: A single Reuters article uses "assault-style weapon", "high-capacity ammunition clip" and quotes the Chicago chief of police using another hyphenated scare word:

"A military-grade weapon on the streets of Chicago is simply unacceptable," McCarthy said. "This kind of shocks the consciousness just like the other high-profile incidents that happen across this country."

I am confident that when the police finally disclose the type of weapon used to shoot these poor folks in Chicago, we will find out two things:

1) The firearm is likely some piece-of-carp "machine pistol" that has no use in any real military, and 
2) The firearm was used by gang members against other gang members and the firearm was illegally owned and possessed. 


That said, I agree with the Chicago chief that such weapons have no place on any city's streets and I fully support any efforts of LE to remove such weapons from the streets and their illegal possessors. 

--- Original post here ---

"Assault Weapon" "Gun Goon" "Common Sense" "National Conversation" "Magazine-clip" "Military-style Weapon" "Law Enforcement Style Shotgun" - wait, "Law Enforcement Style Shotgun", what the heck is that?

Do these words sound familiar? For anyone paying attention to the gun "debate" over the past few years, most of these terms should sound familiar. They have all been conjured, in some cases creatively, by the gun control propagandists to sway public opinion. In many cases they are misleading, non-factual or, worse, intentionally inflammatory to generate the desired emotional response. 

The most recent term to enter the gun-control sect's lexicon is "law enforcement style shotgun" which was conjured this week after the Navy Yard rampage. While many in the media and politics immediately assumed that a dreaded AR-15 assault weapon was used in this attack, it was quickly confirmed that no such weapon was involved. Instead, it was a run of the mill shotgun, the ubiquitous Remington 870 of which more than 10million have been sold to the public over the past 50+ years.

So denied the ability to condemn "the Newtown weapon" in the DC shooting (though the NY Daily News gave its best effort), the gun controllers had to come up with another term to demonize a plain old pump shotgun. Enter the term "law enforcement style shotgun" which means nothing to this owner of shotguns, including an 870. 

So why this new turn of phrase? Well, to make a public who is mostly unfamiliar with firearms fearful of shotguns. But wait, didn't Vice President Biden suggest in a video interview that the best home defense weapon is a shotgun that can be used to fire warning shots and chase off the bad guys? And aren't sporting shotguns like the 870 the type of recreational firearm that the gun controllers tell us they will allow hunters to keep when they take away all of the evil assault weapons? As you can see, it would not be consistent to start vilifying the venerable 870 after so much talk from gun controllers about the shotgun being an "OK" weapon. So someone got to thinking and said "What can we put in front of hyphen style to make this shotgun sound evil?" You see, the gun controller think they were very clever when they started using "military-style rifle" to describe the AR-15. But why did they have to start using that phrase? Because they were losing the battle to call the semi-automatic AR-15 a military weapon. So they dusted off "-style" and came up with "law enforcement-style shotgun". Note that it is not a "law enforcement shotgun" because what the Navy Yard killer bought was a run-of-the-mill shotgun that could be used for hunting and clays shooting. What Alexis did do was take a hacksaw to the 870 and cut down both the barrel and stock making a short-barreled shotgun in violation of federal law. The irony is that the sawed-off shotgun is most definitely NOT a law enforcement-style shotgun because it is inaccurate and difficult to shoot. 

Over at The Truth About Guns, a reader offers a more eloquent discussion about how the gun control community creates its own vocabulary to manipulate a general public that is mostly unfamiliar with firearms:

Birth Of An Inflammatory Gun Term: "Law Enforcement-Style Shotgun"

Have you noticed the new moniker “law-enforcement-style shotgun”? I know you used it on TTAG earlier, but I think we are seeing a new piece of propaganda being born. I’ve seen it repeated in several articles the past few days. Propaganda trends are neat and if we expose them, then people may take offense to the propagandizers’ attempts at manipulating their perspectives . . .

The anti-gun media recognized their mistake calling a magazine a “clip” too late. Our response: “These are two distinct and different pieces of equipment – shows how much you know.”  But they couldn’t just switch the terminology they already invested in, because that may confuse the audience they were propagandizing, so now we have the new moniker, “magazine-clip”.  I’ve seen the ubiquity of this term increase rapidly over the past several months among the anti-gun media and politicians. It’s an attempt to counter the “shows how much you know” response while at the same time not losing their propaganda investment in the word “clip”.

A long time ago we had rifles, lever rifles, bolt action rifles and semi-automatic rifles. We then began to have “service rifles” and “battle rifles” and later “assault rifles”.  All technical terms with specific meanings. Then the propagandizers chose (out of malicious intent, ignorance or both) to call our semi-autos “assault rifles”.  We pointed out that they weren’t “assault rifles” and why they aren’t any more special or capable compared to other semi-automatic rifles. “Shows how much you know, again”.

But they’d already invested greatly in the propaganda, telling people that these were the same weapons the military uses. And to counter our “shows how much you know,” they coined the mew moniker, “military-style assault rifles”.  An attempt, again, to hide their ignorance, conflating civilian weapons with military capabilities to garner support from an uneducated public to prepare the ground to take our semi-automatic rifles away.

But how the heck do you make a pump shotgun sound scary?  A Remington 870? That’s grandpa’s shotgun. Dad had one, for God’s sake. That’s the gun even non-gun people have likely shot some clays with (and my, how fun that was!).  That’s a tough one because people are generally quite comfortable and familiar with pump shotguns. It required coining a new term, setting a new standard for contrivance; the “law enforcement-style shotgun”.

It fits nicely with their other recent incendiary term, “military-style assault rifle” in that it adds special qualifiers up front suggesting that these firearms need to be associated with special status, specially trained individuals and are only to be used for their specially sanctioned purposes. But to preempt complaints about the inaccuracy of the term, they again add “-style” as an excuse.  Exactly what is a “law-enforcement-style” shotty? Are the stocks black plastic instead of wood or camo?  ”Law enforcement-style” is just the newest contrived term, again designed to garner support from the uneducated public to prepare the ground to take our shotguns away.

And while we’re at it, let’s open the debate and have a national conversation about reasonable, common-sense, rational, solutions. Along with any other adjectives and euphemisms  we can conjure up.  ”Opening the debate” is a euphemism for “I want to ban your guns, iteratively over time”.  Calling it a debate suggests that we should have something to say to them and that both parties have something to gain. If we attend the “debate” and win, then we’ll just be invited to another “debate” where they’ll try again to beat us.  If we lose a “debate” we end up losing something, maybe small, and then we get invited to still another “Debate”.

Let’s also have a “national conversation”.  That sounds like we’re going to trade ideas and share perspectives to better understand each other. Who could be against that? But the discussion really boils down to “listen to us tell you that we want to ban your guns”. These “national conversations” imply there is something to be discussed. But I don’t have anything to discuss; they want to ban my guns and they’re going to keep telling me that over and over hoping to wear me down.

“Common sense and rationality.” Again, who can argue with that?  Is it though? What’s happening with these terms is that the propagandizers broadened the term “gun nut” to include anyone who owns a firearm and appreciates having it. Unfortunately, their name calling looked bad, so they had to figure out how to call someone crazy without actually calling them crazy. Simple: you call yourself and your own ideas “common sense and rational.” By implication, anyone who disagrees with you is, therefore, crazy. “Solutions”, even “seeking solutions”, these imply that there is a problem in the first place. In some areas there certainly are, but all of the “solutions” the gun-grabbers are talking about are aimed at solving the problem of legal gun ownership. But it sounds really enlightened. Until you pay attention.