Responding to the Detroit News Special Report...

About two weeks ago, the Detroit News ran what they called a "special report" on firearms manufacturers and safety issues. For three days, they ran multiple stories, describing victims in graphic detail, and attempting to blame gun manufacturers for negligently ignoring safety devices that would have prevented the incidents. It was a tour-de-force of anti-gun propaganda. But propaganda is all it was.

I have written an extensive rebuttal of each story they posted. Please read the rebuttal along with the original story. But before you do that, read the rest of this article to give yourself a grounding in the basic facts of the issue -- a grounding the Detroit News doesn't want you to have.

Some facts from www.gunfacts.info about death from firearms accidents: Compared to dying in a firearms accident, the average person is twice as likely to choke to death, seven times more likely to be poisoned, ten times more likely to die in a fall, and 31 times more likely to die in a car accident. Think about those numbers for a second. Then realize those estimates are from 1997, and accidental firearms deaths have fallen every year since, even though the number of firearms in the US has grown and continues to grow. The "installed base" of firearms in US households is estimated at around 200 million firearms, with one firearm-owning household for every 2 or 3 unarmed households..

Want a solid number? Let's look at children, since the Detroit News loves to present children as victims. In 1996, there were 21 accidental gun deaths for children under 15. Not 21 per day as the media or gun control advocacy groups might have led you to expect: 21. Period. That's all.

So we're not exactly dealing with a crisis here.

The real motive behind this special report is the chance to influence the manufacturer immunity bill currently in the Senate. The bill is designed to protect firearms manufacturers from being sued over criminal acts, in order to block a series of politically-motivated lawsuits seeking to impose gun control via the courts. The Detroit News wants to make it politically difficult to pass this bill.

But to do that, they have to take some serious liberties with common sense.

One of their articles covers a defect in pre-1981 Remington hunting rifles. Yes, this particular problem has been fixed for over 20 years; still they seem to feel it's both current news and relevant to the current bill. A different section deals with Chinese SKS rifles, currently illegal to import for the past 10 years, and manufactured in 1945 -- at the LATEST. Hmm. Real current problem.

Then they spend an entire article attacking Glock for lacking safety features that Glock has deliberately chosen to avoid, in favor of a design that will always fire when the trigger is pulled, and never fire when the trigger is not pulled. Although this is a departure from the tradition of manual safety devices that could block the trigger, it's not an inherently unsafe one. Police departments have demostrated their approval of this design by purchasing Glock firearms in droves. You don't have to agree with the design decision Glock made, because there are firearms with with traditional safety devices available. It's disingenous to call this design decision a safety defect without so much as explaining the reasoning behind it.

And then there's the "victim" file. By that I mean the article which spends its several pages describing a series of incidents in which a child or young adult shot a friend or family member. But there are some common threads to these cases: in almost all of them, the shooter was not authorized to have access to the firearm, and when they gained access, their first thought was to remove the magazine, point the gun at the victim, and pull the trigger.

The Detroit News thinks that's an argument for "magazine safeties" which prevent the gun from firing if the magazine is removed. Guns with such devices are available, but the Detroit News would like them made mandatory, or at a minimum, they would like the victims (or their families) to be able to sue the gun manufacturers out of business... because their friend or child thought that pointing a gun at a human being and pulling the trigger was some sort of funny joke or acceptable horseplay.

Ha-ha. Very funny. Now take me to a hospital.

What those children lacked wasn't a magazine safety on the firearm they weren't supposed to have access to anyway. What they lacked was any concept of consequences or responsibility for their actions. How ironic, then, that the parents of those children are being asked to deny their own responsibility for their child's ignorance of and access to their firearm.

As you've probably guessed, this "special report" isn't exactly the most unbiased representation of the facts you're likely to find. But now that the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act is the law of the land, approved by the Supreme Court, biased reporting like this is going to become the order of the day.