.50-Caliber Shooters Accuse NBC of Bias
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
Leaders in the .50-caliber shooting community have accused NBC’s “Dateline” newsmagazine of bias in its June 19 report on the big bore rifles, and also assert that the network report was misleading.
Fueling their speculation was an e-mail message sent June 17 by Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center (VPC) to alert supporters about the segment, asserting, “The VPC worked closely with ‘Dateline’ on the piece.” Gun Week has obtained a copy of that message.
Further, Gun Week has learned that interview footage with Ronnie Barrett, founder of the Tennessee company that builds many of the leading .50-caliber rifles, was more than four years old, and that in preparation for last month’s segment, “Dateline” contacted a Barrett spokesman to get some updated information.
Barrett confirmed to Gun Week that, “I think what they took was an old interview with me. MSNBC or ‘Dateline’ recorded something long before Sept. 11 (2001).”
Barrett said he was never advised ahead of time that the segment would be aired June 19.
The .50-caliber controversy has been brewing for months, with reports not only on NBC, but also on CBS and various cable news channels.
John Burtt, a retired California police officer and now head of the .50 Caliber Institute, suggested NBC is part of an orchestrated media effort to demonize .50-caliber rifles, in cooperation with anti-gun organizations, including the VPC.
“This is nothing more than a concerted effort and they are using the news media to do that,” Burtt told Gun Week. “I think that NBC, ABC and CBS as well as CNN are part of (an effort) to promote a political agenda. It is well thought-out, well orchestrated.”
Rand’s June 17 e-mail reinforced that notion, but “Dateline” spokesperson Jenny Tartikoff denied the allegation, and insisted that Rand’s e-mail is erroneous.
“I spoke with the producers for ‘Dateline’s’ report on .50-caliber rifles,” she told Gun Week in an e-mail, “and the speculation that ‘Dateline’ broadcast a ‘choreographed hit piece’ is categorically untrue. ‘Dateline’ producers did not ‘work closely’ with VPC. Our contact with the VPC consisted of an interview with Tom Diaz—an obvious choice to represent critics of the .50-cal.—and a review of their publications. ‘Dateline’ independently conducted its own research and a variety of other interviews, including, as you know, one with the president of the leading manufacturer of .50-caliber rifles, Ronnie Barrett. We understand this is a sensitive topic, and ‘Dateline’ approached it with an open mind, as it does with controversial subjects.”
Tartikoff said that at the beginning of a “Dateline” report, the relevance of a story is made clear because it relates to recent news reports.
Rand did not respond to a request from Gun Week for comment.
During the segment, it was asserted that .50-caliber rifles might pose a threat to commercial aircraft because terrorists might be able to shoot one down with the big gun.
Barrett called that allegation “irresponsible.”
He also believes that the NBC report, along with an earlier story that appeared on the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” are part of a campaign to ban not only .50-caliber rifles, but all sporting rifles.
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with the .50 caliber,” Barrett insisted. “It is incrementally a ban on rifles. What you do is come in and try to demonize a particular type of firearms. They tried ‘sniper rifles’ which was any kind of deer rifle, then they did the ‘assault rifle’ which was a 10 year hold on improvements of safety, until politicians saw this was just a scam.
“Now they’re back,” he continued, “saying any guns that are too cheap, let’s get rid of them, any guns that are too powerful, let’s get rid of them. . . . No law has been broken with any of these guns . . . it is a big scam trying to inch in on rifles which are not a part of crime, anyway.”
“A rifle,” Barrett observed, “of course, is not a criminal’s weapon. Rifles are tools of liberty, which gets into another side that nobody likes to talk about, about why the Second Amendment was originally designed. It is necessary for a free state, for the law-abiding owners of the government to have arms. It is a form of checks and balances. That’s why would-be tyrants do not like seeing citizens with rifles.”
He noted the recent ban enacted by the California legislature and signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the first step toward broader rifle bans, because—ignoring the cartridge for which the gun is chambered—was essentially a ban on bolt-action and single-shot rifles.
“That’s sinister,” the gunmaker stated.
Barrett asserted that the campaign against .50-caliber rifles is the brainchild of VPC’s Diaz, and nobody else. The campaign, Barrett said, was created because Diaz “has nothing else to do with his time except preach against .50 caliber rifles. It’s a way to raise money (while) generating tons of misinformation.”
Barrett, who pioneered .50-caliber recreational rifle technology, said it is absurd to believe someone could shoot down a jet with such a rifle, from distances that may reach a mile.
“If you could,” he said, “one of the 50 governments that has the Barrett rifle would have this as their training. If shooting down aircraft with .50 calibers were that easily done, we’d have more people on the ground doing it.”
He noted that an errant bird can bring down a jet by being sucked into the jet engine, but that shooting down an airplane that is coming in to land or take off “is going to be tough.” The airplane will not come down “if you just punch a hole in it.” That myth, he said, was created by the James Bond film “Goldfinger,” in which the villain was sucked through a port window that had been shattered by a pistol bullet.
Incremental Inclusion
Barrett pointed Gun Week to a VPC report from 1999 called “One Shot, One Kill” in which the organization proposed not only restriction on “heavy sniper rifles,” but also on something it called “intermediate sniper rifles.” An “intermediate” sniper rifle would be chambered for such cartridges as the .308 Winchester.
“Congress,” the report concluded, “should immediately amend federal law to bring heavy and intermediate sniper rifles (.50 BMG, .338 Lapua, and perhaps others) under the National Firearms Act. This action would subject these weapons to the same regimen of registration, background checks, taxation, and special permits to which other weapons of war, such as machineguns and destructive devices, are currently subjected.”
The report also stated, “If the firearms industry calls a weapon by a euphemism such as ‘tactical rifle,’ but the rifle has essentially the same design features and accessories as, or is simply a production derivative of, a recognized sniper rifle, we consider it to be a sniper rifle.”
That definition could include any varmint hunting rifle fitted with a special stock, long-range scope and bipod.
Clearly from the VPC report, it appears the anti-gun group has its sights set on rifles chambered in .308 Winchester. A section of the report notes, “The gun industry offers on the civilian market a plethora of military sniper rifles chambered in the civilian equivalent of standard military infantry rounds. Since these calibers are identical to those used in many hunting rifles, it is especially important in some cases to focus on the purpose of the weapon’s design and manufacture.
“One of the most popular of these is the .308 Winchester round, the civilian equivalent of the 7.62x51mm round, the standard NATO infantry rifle round from the 1950s to the 1980s. In the early 1980s, NATO followed the US lead and adopted the smaller 5.56x45mm round as its standard infantry rifle round. The smaller round, sold as .223 in the civilian market, was developed for use in assault rifles like the M-16.
“It has never gained acceptance as a sniping round, because it is generally not believed to have adequate striking power over the long ranges at which snipers operate. Sniper expert (John) Plaster explains the consequences: Beyond any doubt, the .308 Winchester (7.62mm NATO) is the world’s most popular military and law enforcement sniping cartridge. . . .”
Not only Burtt agrees with Barrett’s suspicions, so does Keith Pagel, the military and R&D liaison for the .50 Caliber Shooters Association. He asserted there is a pattern with network coverage of the .50 caliber that coincides with legislative activities to regulate or ban the guns.
“MSNBC did (a report) before ‘Dateline,’ ” Pagel recalled, “and before ‘60 Minutes.’ . . . Each news magazine is going to take a crack at the .50. Every one of those special reports that ran always ran when a piece of legislation had been introduced or was going to be introduced and had run into a major obstacle.”
Pagel suggested that the long-term strategy is to ban or regulate all long guns, and that anti-gunners have focused on .50-caliber rifles because they are used by a very small minority of American shooters.
“They picked a category (of firearms) they didn’t think there would be much resistance,” he said.
According to Pagel, “legislators quote from the news magazines, and then the news magazines turn around and quote the legislators.”
He is convinced there is an anti-gun bias in the press, although he acknowledged that he did not know whether VPC really had much to do with the NBC “Dateline” segment.
“I have seen major newspapers publish stories on .50 calibers that are literally a series of quotes from VPC policy statements,” Pagel stated. “Obviously, there are no thought processes or investigations under way in the press.”
To its credit, the NBC report noted that nobody has ever been killed with a .50-caliber rifle during the commission of a crime anywhere in the United States. Burtt confirmed that shots have been fired from such guns in at least two incidents, including one in Colorado in which the gunman murdered a police officer, but used a different weapon. The gunman in that case later hanged himself in a jail cell.
In the other incident, Burtt said an off-duty SWAT officer was involved in an attempted armored car robbery with some accomplices. They used a .50-caliber rifle to shoot through the armored car, and one of the guards was apparently hit by shrapnel.
Lawmakers in New York and Illinois have been debating legislation aimed at the big guns this year.
Barrett summed it up: “There’s no airplanes made out of half-inch steel. Most pistol bullets go through an airplane (skin). A hole is a hole is a hole. That’s what’s going to be the big revelation, that the legislation is being written for guns that make holes and they are only naming one right now to make it palatable. But, then the door is open. The spirit of the law is to get rid of a cartridge that makes a hole and all cartridges will make holes in these targets. It’s a wonderful back door.”
Return to Archive Index