How Guns Are Getting Bigger – And Possibly More Deadly.

Not only are guns getting bigger, they’re getting into the hands of more criminals, according to a recent investigation by The Trace, with deadly effect.

While all bullets could kill if they hit vital organs, arteries, or the head, experts told The Trace that the bigger the bullet, the more likely any wound will be fatal. Bullets are measured in calibers, or the diameter of their width, in fractions of an inch or millimeter.

In the past 20 years, higher demand from law-abiding citizens and criminals, both claiming concern about self-protection, has led gun manufacturers to make more of these deadlier guns. Legal and illegal citizen buyers alike are scooping up higher-caliber pistols like those originally designed for police from the civilian market and illegal gun runners. As a result, guns with higher caliber bullets are showing up at more crime scenes, leading experts to expect the lethality rate of gun violence to rise, too.

“Demand is shifting because supply is shifting,” SUNY-Albany sociologist David Hureau told The Trace. “Bigger, badder guns are just more available on the secondary market.”

This is a stark change from just 50 years ago, when the criminal’s gun of choice–dubbed the “Saturday Night Special”–was smaller and cheaper. Since then, gun companies have marketed bigger, higher-caliber weapons like 9mm, .40, and .45 caliber pistols as adequate for keeping average citizens concerned about self-defense—”citizen protectors,” as one sociologist called them—safe.

I sent this to myself today with that subject line (“The dumbest gun headline of the day).  I see that Bob Owens has already posted on this, and I basically concur with his sentiments.  The article is nonsense, and the writers obviously don’t know anything about their subject.

The .45 ACP has been around and in use by both military and civilians for more than a century, and the large revolver cartridges have been around for an even longer time than that.  In fact, the .38 Special is approximately the same diameter as the 9mm, or in other words, the “Saturday Night Special” to which the author refers is about the same as the 9mm that she calls a “bigger, higher caliber” round.

Actually, I see the opposite happening because I actually know something about guns.  I use .45 ACP and always will, but the most popular cartridge in America is the 9mm and I see people leaving the larger calibers for the smaller ones (e.g., 9mm, .380 ACP, etc.).

But I’ll observe something about this article that Bob missed.  It was “written” by someone named Carla Javier with Fusion.  Within an hour, another writer with Fusion wrote an article that could be mistaken for the one you just read, by someone named Alex Yablon, entitled America’s Obsession With Powerful Handguns Is Giving Criminals Deadlier Tools.

Some editor at Fusion, if they have such a thing there, made the decision to publish virtually the same article under different bylines within one hour of each other.  In and of itself that is only moderately interesting and goes to show their utter disdain for Americans whom they think they can beat into submission with words.  But here’s the really interesting thing.

Guess how I found these two articles?  That’s right, by a Google News search on the word “guns.”  Think about that for a moment.  These articles are quite literally fake news.  There is nothing in them but propaganda, and any pseudo-educated gun owner can debunk the data in there, and if a Google employee cared to convert inches to millimeters, s/he could easily have called bullshit on the two articles.

But no, these are seen by Google news feed as newsworthy.  Here’s the kicker.  The Captain’s Journal, which provides vastly superior analysis to anything Fusion could ever hope to put out, cannot get on the Google News feed.  Bob Owens is on the Google News feed (for which I don’t begrudge him), and Bob didn’t say anything different than I did.  But I connected the dots to propagandizing by Fusion.

You didn’t read that anywhere else but TCJ.  But remember boys and girls, Google thinks I’m not news worthy.  Perhaps Google is trafficking in fake news, yes?