My issue with Professor Saul Cornell and his made-up firearms “facts” is not a matter of terminology or technicality — I don’t give a hoot whether you know the difference between a “clip” and a “magazine” or anything like that.
But if you are going to — listen, now, kids — advocate public policies based on the particular characteristics of particular firearms, then you have an intellectual and moral responsibility to be honest about those characteristics and not misrepresent them, rather than do as Professor Cornell has done and simply invent some scientific-sounding fiction to bolster your weak rhetorical case. If you are going to say, “We should ban this rifle because of x,” then x had better be true.
Unfortunately, in nine cases out of ten, it isn’t.
Guns make people emotional. Consider a parallel case:
I do not know very much about U.S. food-regulation practices. But if there were an outbreak of, say, scombrotoxin cases from bad seafood and I wrote, “We should really regulate seafood more rigorously, particularly tuna, since tuna is 6,000 times more likely to give you food poisoning than salmon is,” you might ask: “Really? Where did you learn that?” And if I pointed to a famous study of the horsemeat trade in 19th-century Paris and told you I had “extrapolated” my tuna claim from those numbers, you would very understandably think me either a fraud or insane. But we accept that kind of thing — and not only from such dishonest figures as Professor Cornell — on firearms, because the cultural resonance of the issue gives people permission and incentive to suspend their critical-thinking faculties.
Again, I don’t think this has to be an issue of technicalities — but if you are going to make it a matter of technical questions, then you should do us all the favor of learning something about your subject matter before writing on it in a national media platform.
Academic life is not my area, but I was a newspaper editor for a long time, and I wish that journalists and editors would have some respect for the job. If you are going to lie to the public when it suits you politically, then don’t complain when people say the media lie to the public and dismiss you when you are telling the truth — Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
Do your goddamned jobs. It would be refreshing to see you try.