Does Giffords Even Know What a Bump Stock Is?
We all knew that groups like Giffords wouldn’t be thrilled with the Supreme Court’s decision on bump stocks. Now, it’s a matter of administrative law that, frankly, everyone should be able to rally behind versus a true Second Amendment issue, but Giffords and other anti-gun groups were never going to see it that way.
And honestly, that’s fine in and of itself. They have every right to be wrong.
But for all the hysteria, it seems Giffords doesn’t even know what a bump stock actually is.
That’s based on their choice of art for a tweet decrying the decision.
TAKE ACTION 📣📣📣
The Supreme Court may have struck down the federal ban on bump stocks, but we can still undo their shameful decision.
Sign a petition to tell Congress to ban bump stocks: https://t.co/mhWbgK57Jd pic.twitter.com/fwRlSc41fp
— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) June 16, 2024
That’s right. That’s an adjustable butt stock like you’d get standard on most AR-15s.
X, formerly Twitter, is filled with people who took Giffords to task for this mistake, but here’s a particularly adroit one. (Outkick has a lot of others here for your amusement.)
“Wow I can’t believe Justice Thomas would use DIAGRAMS and a GIF to show how a gun works!” -People who think this is a bump stock: https://t.co/6YguPxXYfs pic.twitter.com/7jAv1GCnOf
— Rob Romano (@2Aupdates) June 16, 2024
Yeah, so now we know why Thomas would need to do such a thing. People wanted to act like he had to do that to justify the ruling when, in fact, it’s because so many of those who pushed in the other direction didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.
Look, it’s not hard to find what a bump stock looks like. Google is filled with images of them. The AP uses photographs in their feed–a feed we often use for our own photographs of bump stocks–so a simple image search should have been an easy matter.
They simply didn’t do it.
Now, they’re not absolutely required to, but considering they try to present themselves and their people as experts on guns on a regular basis, this makes that a much harder sell. It’s akin to USA Today trotting out the chainsaw bayonet as if it’s something people are tripping over themselves to put on their AR-15s.
The truth is that the people who work at Giffords don’t know what they’re talking about. They don’t understand firearms in any appreciable way. The only thing they’re really experts in is trying to sell gun control to the media and convincing they they understand the topic more than they actually do.
This is why people calling for assault weapon bans on social media are almost always challenged to define an assault weapon. It’s because these people don’t understand what they’re talking about in the least. They’re just calling for policy solutions to what they claim is a problem without any real understanding of, well, anything.
Usually, they don’t broadcast their ignorance quite so badly or broadly. This time they did and one could hope that a lot of the people watching and seeing this will start to think twice about trusting Giffords as a viable source of firearm-related expertise.
Unfortunately, the media will keep pushing them as just that.
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