Wall Street Journal lapses into newspeak when it comes to guns

[Seminole]

I probably spend way too much time online.

There is a good picture of a machine gun as well as a video if you follow the link.

Wall Street Journal lapses into newspeak when it comes to guns

So there I was quickly scanning my newspapers last Thursday morning while riding a Yellow Line Metro train from Huntington Station in Fairfax County toward the River City, also known as the District of Columbia.

Ahaauhhh!??? I exclaimed.

Heads turned on that quiet morning train filled with freshly scrubbed but tired commuters.

Red faced, I did not dare look up as I incredulously read the newspaper correction over and over:

"U.S. law-enforcement officials have seen a spike in heavy-caliber rifles heading to Mexico. A World News article Saturday incorrectly quoted William D. Newell of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives describing a spike in machine guns. "Machine gun" is a technical term for a classification of a firearm that doesn't describe the type of weapon he was referring to."

This correction was printed on page 2 of the Wall Street Journal on March 5, 2009, and made me feel like I had slipped into an Orwellian world of “newspeak.” You know, the language being promoted by the ruling elites of England in Orwell’s book 1984. Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar whose aim is to make any alternative thinking impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on.

Let’s review some basic terms:

A "semi-automatic firearm" fires one round with every pull of the trigger, just like a revolver.

A “machine gun” fires “automatically” two or more rounds with one pull of the trigger.

An “assault rifle” is a military term for a rifle which can be fired semi-automatically or as a machine gun, automatically, by way of a switch to select the mode of fire.

But an “assault weapon” is just an Orwellian term coined by anti-gun politicians for “scary looking rifles” which are not machine guns – just dressed up cosmetically to look like military assault rifles with pistol grips, flash suppressors, and perhaps a bayonet mounting lug.

And as the Washington Post’s investigative reporter Tom Jackman discovered in reporting on the 2006 slaying of Fairfax County, VA police officer Vickey Armel by madman Michael Kennedy, it turned out to be Kennedy’s hunting rifle, and not his “AK-47-style assault rifle,” which fired the rounds capable of penetrating officer Armel’s vest.

Misuse of the term “machine gun” to describe ordinary run of the mine rifles by the Wall Street Journal goes to show you that when it comes to guns, the mainstream media knows no shame. Labeling a machine gun a “technical term” for certain rifles is about as kookie as saying a tank is a special type of automobile.

But like Syme said to Winston Smith, “t's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word?” George Orwell, 1984 at 51 (1949).