Assault rifle sales go boom

In 1989 gun store owners didn't want to talk to the media. They said we knew nothing about guns. They were right then -- and still are. I promised accuracy but a copy editor inserted a big mistake.

When this story appeared Saturday morning, Mr. Megysesy of Ace Sporting Goods blew his top.

A veteran but certifiably nuts PG copy editor — who’s job was to spot mistakes, make fixes in style and write a headline — made only one small change to what I wrote.

He added two characters and a hyphen in this paragraph that, if they had been accurate, could have cost Megysesy his gun-selling license.

The bad letters were “M-2.”

The copy editor thought he was being smart, but he proved how dumb he and most newspaper people are about guns.

The M-2 looks like this:

The M-2 is an automatic weapon. Gun stores in 1989 and today can not sell automatic weapons over the counter unless the buyer has a special federal license that is pricey and takes a long time to get.

The media today still constantly make the mistake of thinking semi-automatic rifles like the popular AR-15 allow you to merely squeeze and hold the trigger and shoot a constant Al Capone Gang-like stream of machine gun fire at your target.

They don’t.

Semi-automatics — even if they look like real assault rifles — require a trigger squeeze for each shot.

The “M-2” inserted in what I think was the first Page 1 story of my career, at age 42, proved gun store owners were right to fear a story about guns by a newspaper predominantly staffed by liberals who hated guns.

In 1989 the print and electronic media were clueless about guns — and generally still are.