No, Hodgkinson Did Not Use an Assault Rifle

It is appropriate that a fanatical supporter of Bernie Sanders would use an SKS for his shooting spree. At the height of the cold war, Sanders was the Mayor of Burlington, and decorated his office with the flag of the Soviet Union. He aggressively sided with Soviet clients in Central America, and even spent his honeymoon in the drab and miserable USSR. Designed in 1943, the SKS was used by the Soviet Red Army before it was rendered obsolete by the AK-47.

Contrary to media reports, it is not an assault rifle. Unlike the AR-15, the SKS does not even look like one. It is a semiautomatic of dated design that holds 10 rounds in a fixed magazine (although modified version can hold a detachable magazine). You might call it the communist version of the M1 Garand. The SKS was not covered under Bill Clinton’s assault weapon ban. After BLM moonbat Micah Johnson used an SKS to murder five Dallas police officers, CBS News described the gun as a “curio or relic.”

Yet the media, ever eager for a pretext to go after the AR-15 (a.k.a. America’s Rifle), keeps reporting that Hodgkinson used an assault rifle. The Chicago Tribune called the gun “an SKS assault rifle.” That’s like calling someone’s sedan “a Toyota Camry truck.” ABC News barks that Hodgkinson used a “legally purchased assault rifle.” No, he did not. CNN absurdly called the SKS “a Chinese-made variant of the popular AK rifle,” although at least they corrected the mistake afterward. CBS News confirmed that the gun used was an M4 carbine, which does not even vaguely resemble an SKS.

Keep all this in mind the next time you are tempted to take anything the media says at face value. If they are this clueless and/or deceptive about guns, chances are good the same is true on other topics.

On a tip from JeffersonSpinningInGrave.