Here’s the photograph CNN is running on their website with a story about a Pennsylvania boy who was arrested due to suspicions he was planning a “‘Columbine type event” at a high school.
Pretty damning, eh? That kid’s got a crap-load of weapons. MP5, four AK rifles, some pistols, fantasy swords, shotguns… he was loaded for bear. But wait… read into the story and it changes:
Police in Plymouth Township near Philadelphia took the boy into custody after a search of his home turned up a number of weapons, including a 9 mm rifle with a laser scope and dozens of air guns.
Police also found an operational hand grenade, three other hand grenades in the process of construction, bomb-making equipment and manuals.
The boy’s mother bought the assault rifle for him several weeks ago at a gun show, police said. No ammunition was found for the rifle.
The kid had one 9mm rifle and dozens of air guns. The photo being shown with the story on CNN’s site has this caption, “Police took a 14-year-old boy into custody after a search of his home turned up dozens of weapons.” Makes it look like all those weapons in the story are firearms. An airgun is not a firearm which is why kids can have them. Only one of those weapons in that photo is an actual firearm. This is deception either of slack-jawed ignorance or of the willful type. Take your pic, both are harmful.
If you save the image from CNN’s site, you’ll notice the filename is “art.arsenal.wpvi.jpg.” Arsenal. I can picture the staffer who named the file breathing rapidly and nervously over the big mean death sticks in that photo. He/she probably fainted while editing it.
Another point. A 9mm gun is not an assault rifle. Maybe a carbine at best. Why? The 9mm round is a pistol-calibre round. Assault rifles tend to be chambered in calibres like 5.56mm, 7.62mm, .308, etc. These seem like nit-picking details here, but in reality, the details matter. Remember the D.C. sniper shootings? Everyone was convinced and told repeatedly by law enforcement that the suspects were middle-aged white men in a white cargo van. The reality? Two Muslim African American men in a blue sedan.
I dream of a world where reporters are knowledgeable about the topics they cover, not to mention the truth. I don’t have much support in reality for that dream, though.
3 responses so far ↓
1 SCurtis // Oct 11, 2007 at
The “assault weapon” was a cheap Hi-Point 9mm carbine that costs less than $200. That is hardly an assault rifle. Not that you can’t kill people with it, but give me a break. If its semi-auto, its an assault weapon. If its bolt-action, its a sniper rifle. If its a shotgun, its a street sweeper. Pick a gun and they will find a sensationalistic term for it.
While I think it quite likely that this kids parents are idiots and out to lunch, it bugs me that the press is so hellbent on the idea that it is wrong for a kid to have a gun. Excuse me, but kids have had hunting rifles for generations. I bought my 9 year-old a .22 for her birthday last year, so I could teach her proper gun handling and marksmanship. We go to the range together two or three times a month and we are looking around for a youth shooting program she can get involved with. That makes me a wacko? Give me a break.
I also wonder about bomb making materials. I had something a lot like the Anarchist’s Cookbook when I was a kid and loved making explosives out of household chemicals. I used to blow stuff up in the back yard for fun when my mom wasn’t home. That didn’t mean I had any intention of hurting anyone. I was just a 12 year-old that thought it was cool to make stuff go boom. Boys have been doing that for generations too. Why do you think kids wanted chemistry sets? Its normal childhood stuff. Why do I suspect that today these idiots would have sent me off for a psych eval?
If the kid was making threats, that’s a problem. It sounds like he was and that he had real issues, which makes his mom a complete moron for giving him a gun. My concern is that our society has really gotten nuts and irrational about a lot of this stuf and the press hyping every incident that comes along doesn’t help.
2 Morgan // Oct 12, 2007 at
9mm assualt rifle? Semi-automatic SMG sounds nearly as scary. Why can’t they do their fear mongering with the correct words? It blows my mind that a DA screwed this up too.
They cared enough to call an AR-15 a “police style rifle” after the cop shot 6 people. Why the unwillingness to fear-monger when the gun is held by a cop?
This is all beside the point, because nothing on that table is illegal until they’ve established intent, nor should it be! It doesn’t sound like they have it to me, and they should have left the guns out of it! If they can’t figure out which 2 he’s supposed to be Matrix spraying, then they obviously don’t have evidence of intent they claim!
Looks to me like the parents collection! More than half of that obviously belongs to the parents. As if a 14 year old paid for a stash like that himself! What parent buys their kids more guns than they own themselves?
They should have left the neo-Nazi crap out of it. They’re begging for a lawsuit across the map! Nazi’s are idiots, but they have a right to be idiots and to bear arms!
All they have on this kid is a weak conspiracy charge, and a manufacture of an explosive device. Nice attempt at stealing the spotlight from the real school shooting news.
I was already going to boycott cnn over their refusal to give Ron Paul due coverage, but this is the last straw.
3 Bad Mojo Comment Spam » Swanky Conservative // Oct 18, 2007 at
[...] article the spammer is trying to suck up to is the one I wrote talking about the kid getting busted by the cops with an arsenal of air guns. Ugh. That’s a whole other degree of [...]
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