A Rebuttal: Magazine Claims Guns Need Confiscating because their Technology has Gotten Away from the Original Owners

This gem of an article almost slipped by everyone. The impeachment investigation is sucking up all the air in the room, allowing a lot of ridiculous propaganda and outright lies to slip out and become accepted facts about gun owners and what happens to military grade weapons once they are done being used in battle.

A perfect example is a recent piece published in Slate magazine. The premise behind “What a 150-Year-Old Gun Tells Us About the End of Colt’s AR-15” is that arms technology often “gets away” from gunmakers and outlives their designers, makers and original owners.

Regarding firearms, the opinion piece callously claims: “When they retire from military service, they still have a lot of death in them.” The piece uses historic examples to incite panic in Americans with the idea that military weapons like the M-4 and M-16 will fall into the hands of our enemies (mostly those not yet known) and anti-government domestic terrorists (aka gun owners in America) when they are decommissioned from the military.

The writer tries to prove his insane premise by using an example of a antique breech-loading Peabody-Martini rifle dating back to the post-Civil War era. The 150 year old rifle is in perfect working order in 2019, the writer says, and laments that the same likely would happen with the military grade M-16 and civilian AR-15s.

He wholly ignores the fact the Peabody-Martini rifle, though clearly capable of delivering death, clearly has not. It belongs to the National Museum of American History, and has not been in use for over a century. The article also fails to mention that finding ammo for it likely is out of the question—rendering the weapon useless.

The writer then turns his attention to the AR-15 and says it likely is “immortal” to be in civilian hands due to its modular capabilities. The ability to customize an AR-15 ensures its long life.

It’s then suggested that because there are more than 16 million of them in civilian hands, that the only way to ensure these guns don’t get into the wrong hands is to institute a nationwide gun confiscation program.

The author claims the high numbers in civilian hands and the ability to customize the AR-15 means the rifle already “has done what military technology has done throughout history: It has escaped the control of its producers.”

The overtly biased writer incorrectly calls the M-16 the “military equivalent” of the AR-15. That is a blatant falsehood. Other than appearance, the rifles are very far apart. The M-16 is a true assault rifle, with automatic fire capability. The AR-15 is a semi-automatic that is illegal to convert for automatic fire.

The vast majority of AR-15s do not have the same build quality as an M-16 or the newer M4 variant. Many AR-15s are incapable of handling the military 5.56 mm round. Most use the civilian .223 Remington, which is less potent than the military counterpart.

Despite all of this being easily available information, anti-gunners like the one who wrote this piece in Slate persist with spreading lies to the uninformed about the AR-15, military-style rifles, and gun owners. The author says owners of military-style rifles are “up-arming, preparing to fight one another and any government, including their own, that intrudes on their cherished ideas of autonomy.” In other words, if you own an AR-15, you must be a government-hating kook and domestic terrorist in hiding.

That implication about gun owners being dangerous, anti-government terrorists is clear when the far-left writer says gun owners “look to secure themselves against all comers, and in so doing, put themselves and their fellow citizens at greater risk of gun-related injury or death than in any other industrialized nation.”

The point of this articles is clear. The write and the magazine that promotes it intends to erode support for guns and the Second Amendment. And they have no qualms about doing it with falsified information and lies.  

What’s sad is that you won’t see a gaggle of liberal politicians demanding such lies be vetted by publishers. When the lie fits their particular political narrative, politicians of all ilk support it.