National Review Fail of the Week

Chilly Willy, via Rufio Jones.

Oh hai, Charles C.W. (Chilly Willy) Cooke:

DECEMBER 15, 2014 6:16 PM

Why Gun-Control Advocates Lie about Guns 
The facts aren’t on their side. 

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Oh, well, that would be a reason. Which facts are those? It's that desperately mendacious Mike Lupica writing in the Daily News over an unsettling Pew poll:

Over the course of 900 words, Lupica lambasted the public for continuing “to protect gun nuts,” chided the “mouth-breathing” NRA for its murderous myopia, and contended emotively that “there are no words” available to describe the horror of “a recent poll that says a majority of Americans believe it is more important to protect the right to own guns than it is for the government to limit access to guns.”

Are you seriously denying that the NRA is composed of mouth breathers, Charles? No,

And then, having established his moral bona fides for all to see, he tried to sneak a brazen lie past his audience:

The flyers on the table feature a picture of a beautiful, smiling girl with a pink bow in her hair, with Christmas and her whole life ahead of her until Adam Lanza walked into her school on a Friday morning with an automatic weapon — the kind of gun we are told must be protected or the Second Amendment is turned into a dishrag — and started shooting.

I'm sorry, what was that? Was Grace McDonnell ugly, frowning, wearing a green ribbon? Was she murdered on a Thursday?

That Lupica would knowingly write these words should be of great concern to anybody who is concerned with the truth. There were no “automatic” weapons used at Sandy Hook. Rather, Adam Lanza used a standard semi-automatic rifle of the sort that millions upon millions of Americans have in their homes. Moreover, Mike Lupica knows this full well, for on every other occasion he has written about the AR-15, he has described it correctly.

Oh, there are exactly two syllables missing from the story: he didn't say "semi". That's a pretty Big Lie all right.

In the first place if it is normal for Lupica not to tell this despicable lie about the AR-15, then this single exception is not very good evidence for the assertion that "gun control advocates lie". As far as Charles can tell us, they usually don't. In the second place how exactly does this falsehood bolster Lupica's case? What facts not on his side does it conceal?

I guess if Adam Lanza had been carrying an automatic that would have been illegal under the terms of the National Firearms Act of 1968, so, uh...  So Lupica's unfairly trying to make Lanza look like a criminal?

Actually Lupica's uncharacteristic mistake would, if you wanted to take it seriously, make nonsense out of his argument. When a severely mentally ill boy carried a semi-automatic rifle into Sandy Hook Elementary and slaughtered 20 little kids and six adults he was doing it with the support of law that gun control advocates would like to change and gun control opponents would not. That's what the argument is about; automatic weapons have nothing whatever to do with the case.

So if the answer is "the facts aren't on their side" then the question ought to be "Why does Cookie treat an obvious and trivial editorial error as a vicious and conclusion-changing calumny, Alex?"

Incidentally, the day after Cookie's piece ran in NRO, seven Taliban attackers in Peshawar used automatic rifles in a school to kill 140-odd children compared to Lanza's 20. There may be a colossal difference of some kind, ethical or aesthetic, between automatic and semi-automatic rifles, but from the economic standpoint, in terms of sheer child-killing productivity, they're just about the same fucking thing. Ban them.