GRANT STINCHFIELD (HOST): When it comes to media bias, it is often the little things that matter most. Seemingly innocuous phrases designed to sway your opinion. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently wrote an article about campus carry taking effect in Georgia and the controversy surrounding it. But it's their use of the word weapon that has me bewildered. The reporter uses “weapons” in place of firearms or guns so many times, it just becomes bizarre. Here, "Fears of gun owners getting drunk and firing their weapons." I firmly believe she uses the phrase weapons over firearms in an effort to scare the uninformed. But then I realized Georgia calls their concealed carry permits a “weapons carry license.” I don’t like that name at all. To me, the military carries weapons, guns carried for offensive purposes. I carry a firearm, a tool used for self-defense. To me, it is actually a very important distinction. By Georgia, a state rich in firearms history, using the term weapons in an official capacity, it hurts the perception of law-abiding gun ownership. The media already has it out for us, why give them more ammunition?
Okay it is one thing to claim that guns are perfectly safe in the hands of the average American, a claim which I continue to dispute, however to claim that they are not a weapon completely defies logic.
The NRA has for decades now attempted to convince people that guns are simply tools similar to a crowbar or a knife, meaning that though they COULD take a life, they're actual purpose is to do something else entirely.
In the case of a crowbar it would be to pry something apart, and a knife is used to cut food or perhaps rope, but there really is NO other purpose that a gun serves than to take a life.
When these folks claim that a gun is a tool for self protection they avoid the fact that it only protects if an assailant believes they are in danger of being injured or killed by the WEAPON, or are in fact injured or killed by the WEAPON.
It is the very fact that they own a weapon capable of injuring or killing which is supposed to keep the owner safe.
Of course statistics do not actually support that assertion, but that is an entirely different conversation.
But before we can have that conversation at the very least we should agree on what we are talking about, and that is that guns are in fact weapons. Weapons which are designed to kill, and that is all they are designed to do.
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