Shotgun stupidity strikes media -- Twice in one day

Those multiple levels of rigorous fact-checking seem to have failed the media once again. This time it's a combination of Sarah Palin and guns, always an explosive mix loved by the MSM.

Newsweek labored long and hard trying to find a photo of Sarah Palin with a gun to use on the cover of their "hit" piece titled The Palin Problem on the VP nominee the MSM just loves to hate.

This is the best they would find, from 2002, and they used it without Sarah's knowledge or permission. But what the hey, it's a good photo and contrary to what the idiots at Newsweek think, linking Sarah to guns helps a lot more than it hurts. The anti-gun crowd ain't going to vote for her in the first place but a photo like that just makes us gun nuts love her even more.

And there are a few armed liberals out there.

But here's where the stupidity kicks in. Elizabeth Snead's L.A. Times newspaper blog is accurately titled "The Dish Rag," and this gun expert used the cover photo with the headline: How did Newsweek get Sarah Palin to pose with a rifle?

They didn't. Mainly because that ain't a rifle. It's a shotgun, as any self-respecting gun nut can see in a flash.

And then the poor gun-ignorant newsblogger makes it even worse by putting the other foot in her mouth.

Hey, is that even the right way to hold a rifle? Can't you shoot your foot off like that?

No, Elizabeth, you can't shoot your foot off with a shotgun with the breech open and obviously unloaded. In fact, the NRA (of which Sarah is a lifetime member, God bless her) teaches that method as the safest possible carry for a shotgun in the field. All around can see the shotgun is open and unloaded and if by some miracle is should accidentally discharge (impossible when it's unloaded and open) the barrels are pointed to the ground where it will do no harm.

Ace reported this little gem of media stupidity and adds:

That's the over-under, break-open, breech-loading 12 gauge sort of rifle.

These are the people who presume to set the gun control policy for this country.

The same press corps which breathlessly invokes "semiautomatic pistol" as words of talismanic import, as if they're describing exotic weaponry on the level of "phased plasma rifle in deh forty watt range."

Thanks to Ace Queen from Free Republic.

Heh: All the comments on the LAT Blog are telling her the same thing. Though one guy claims it's a side-by-side shotgun. I think it's over-under, as most say.

Anyway, this was a funny comment:

The way she is pointing that loaded Machine Gun proves she is racist.

Posted by: Journalism Student | October 08, 2008 at 06:30 PM

Hey Journalism Student! You're Noo Yawk Times material, keep on hitting those books. Or toking on that bong or drinking Obama Kool-Aid or whatever you're doing in school. And that ain't no "loaded Machine Gun" or even any kind of machine gun, you idiot. And while I'm ranting, don't you pukes ever get tired of saying everything a Republican does is racist? Guess not.

I agree with Ace that it's an over-under shotgun, I think that's obvious. It might be a 12 gauge, but I'm not sure about that with these 61-year-old eyes. Ace is a lot younger than me.

In other stupid-media shotgun news, The Peninsula Daily News in Washington state reports a big scoop: Woman shot in leg by her stove

SEKIU — Cory Davis, 56, had just finished stoking her cast-iron stove to heat her home when something inside it exploded.

With a loud bang, she was struck on the inside of her left calf.

"I kept thinking, 'geeze that was one fast hot coal flying at me,'" she said, with a laugh.

"But it wasn't a coal."

It was part of a 22-gauge shotgun shell that had been accidentally placed in the stove along with some newspaper.

Davis said a case of the ammo had spilled in her home, located at Hoko-Ozette Road, about a month ago.

She thinks one shell was in newspaper she had used to light the stove.

Two teeny little errors here. First, the stove didn't shoot her. The shotgun shell did. Second, I'd never heard of a 22 gauge shotgun so I googled it. Only good hit I got, admist some myspace BS about webpage themes and other assorted junk, was for a Hudson Bay 22 Gauge Percussion shotgun, a genuine antique.

Percussion, for you non-gun-nut readers, means a blackpowder muzzle-loader fired with percussion caps, sorta like those cap guns your PC parents would never let you play with.

It most definitely does not fire 22 gauge shotgun "shells" which are modern, breech-loading, self-contained charges of powder and lead pellets. The only other firearm related hit I got on 22 gauge was a QA page at Outdoor Help where a 13-year-old kid asked about using one for turkey hunting. The expert said he'd never heard of 22 gauge and recommended the kid get a 20 gauge.

A little bit of knowledge is dangerous, especially when it comes to media reporting on guns.