CNN demonstrated a complete misunderstanding, or willful misrepresentation, of guns when it displayed a graphic of an AR-15, and tried to explain how a bump stock worked following the shooting at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas. While CNN congressional correspondent Phil Mattingly talked with The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer about what possible actions Congress could take to regulate bump stocks, a graphic displayed at the top of the screen showed an AR-15 with a suppressor — which is a heavily regulated National Firearms Act (NFA) item — along with a grenade launcher; civilians cannot purchase grenades. The graphic did not, however, include a bump stock on the gun, which was the entire point of the graphic and the segment.
Weisser sums it up nicely: “For selling a legal product to a consumer and selling it following exactly the rules and regulations which governed such sales, Dave lost his entire business and millions of dollars in sales, inventory and future profits, lost his reputation, spent thousands of dollars on legal fees and now sits at home still waiting for the legal aftermath of Sandy Hook to come to an end.”
While the title is correct, in its summary of the new poll, Gallup expressed surprise at the results and described flagging support for a ban in the midst of a terrorism spree as a "paradox." Gallup also completely botched both its definition of "assault weapon" and its characterization of "assault rifles."