Gun misinformation

As I've noted plenty of times, the Oklahoman will often run letters that include blatant lies when the letter supports a position that is in accords with the far-right agenda of its editors. This includes the current debate about guns and gun control, as evidenced by today's letter from Michael Shults of Oklahoma [City?]. He writes:

No assault weapon was used in the Sandy Hook shooting. The shooter, Adam Lanza, tried to purchase weapons and the laws we have in place stopped him. Lanza killed his mother to get a rifle but only handguns were used, not "assault weapons." Lanza had an assault weapon, but it was left in the car and never used. The Obama administration has shown a lack of responsibility in basing policy on a personal agenda and not on facts.

 For real? "Only handguns were used"? From CNN:

Adam Lanza brought three weapons inside Sandy Hook Elementary school on December 14 and left a fourth in his car, police said. Those weapons were a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle and two handguns -- a Glock 10 mm and a Sig Sauer 9 mm. 

In the car he left a shotgun, about which police have offered no details. Lanza used one of the handguns to take his own life... 

The primary weapon used in the attack was a "Bushmaster AR-15 assault-type weapon," said Connecticut State Police Lt. Paul Vance. The rifle is a Bushmaster version of a widely made AR-15, the civilian version of the M-16 rifle used by the U.S. military. The original M-16 patent ran out years ago, and now the AR-15 is manufactured by several gunmakers.

Uh, that doesn't sound like a handgun to me! Here's a picture, so we're clear:

 So, no. NOT a handgun.

To be fair, this weapon was a semiautomatic. That is, with each pull of the trigger, it fires a bullet, ejects the spent shell, cocks the hammer, and loads another bullet-- but it only fires one bullet per pull of the trigger. Most pistols available today are like this so it is not as though Lanza was able to squeeze off more rounds than had he used a pistol.

Nevertheless, these assault rifles have high capacity magazines (in this case, 30 rounds) meaning that he can go quite some time before having to eject the spend magazine and insert a new one-- much longer than with a pistol, that typically has magazines with one half to one third the capacity.

So was this Bushmaster an "assault weapon"? The term is somewhat ambiguous, but by conventional definitions, yes it was. (Note the distinction between this an an assault rifle, which allows for multiple round to be fired with a single pull of the trigger.) Thus, once again, the Oklahoman runs a letter filled with blatant falsehoods and misinformation, all to push their own right-wing agenda. And yet, ironically, they have the gall to run a letter that accuses the President of pushing "policy [based on] on a personal agenda and not on facts."

Sad.