Right to Opine

A gun store owner in Phoenix has been brought up on a number of charges related to fraudulently selling guns and helping the buyers smuggle them into Mexico. Looks like the BATFE has the goods on him, including the direct involvement of undercover officers in purchases the owner believed to be fronts for smugglers. If true, this is exactly the kind of operation we honest gun owners want shut down.

The thing that bothers me about this article is its dishonest and misleading use of terminology. For example,

the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers

This simply is not true. An AK-47 is a fully automatic military weapon and cannot legally be sold in the US to anyone outside the military, law enforcement, or the very few people holding a special license to purchase fully automatic weapons. The rifles in question are semi-automatic rifles, the function and capability of which is no different than many standard hunting rifles. One pull of the trigger gets you a single shot…not the kind of repeated rapid fire of an automatic.

Later in the article we see

the Mexican authorities have seized seven of the Kalashnikov-style rifles from gunmen

This is, again, misleading. A Kalashnikov is a fully automatic rifle. These weren’t, but were designed to look like them. The appearance of a weapon has no relationship to its function. (Just ask anyone who’s ever driven a Pontiac Fiero…looks great, but it’s a pooch.) Elsewhere in the article the meaningless term “assault rifle” is bandied about as if it, too, has a specific meaning. Gun grabbers like to use the term to refer to any rifle that looks like a military grade fully automatic weapon, regardless of its capability. The truth is that no military on earth would use the rifles in question, as they cannot be fired in automatic mode and don’t have the firepower needed for military use. They’re no more “assault rifles” than your uncle’s Winchester 30-30.