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CNN Finds Clueless Air Defense General to Invent Fake AR-15 Setting

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This is why some people shouldn’t play with guns.

CNN employee Gary Tuchman, a staff correspondent for card-carrying liberal Anderson Cooper’s “Anderson Cooper 360” program, has spent a career traveling the world to hotspots like earthquakes in Japan and Haiti, a volcanic eruption in Iceland, and even the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain.

But nothing, apparently, prepared him for the sheer horror of an American gun range, with an AR-15 fired on “full semi-automatic.”

In a video posted Monday as part of the “very fake news” network’s coverage of the controversy over gun ownership in the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Tuchman set out to give what he obviously hoped would be an eye-opening view of the unique dangers posed by the AR-15.

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What he did instead – with the unfortunate help of a retired Army lieutenant general – was demonstrate just how much clueless ignorance and incompetence influences the gun-grabber side of the Second Amendment debate.

In the video, Tuchman engaged in a lot of heavy-handed voice-overs aimed at playing up the apparently hidden dangers of a product owned by millions of law-abiding American citizens.

“A defining characteristic of the AR-15 is the speed and power of the bullet,” Tuchman intones dramatically, while stating the obvious. (Those factors are also a big reason the gun is so popular for self-defense.)

His interview subject, retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, might have been worse, because he obviously knows better. Maybe the allure of the CNN celebrity he’s enjoyed since leaving the service has made him cooperative with CNN’s agenda, whatever it is.

Regardless, a 37-year career in the Army, including a stint as U.S. commander in Europe, didn’t keep Hertling from talking nonsense like saying he was going to fire the rifle on “full semi-automatic.” That’s a contradiction in terms, and if anyone at CNN knew anything about weapons, they probably would have shot the video over, or edited it out.

Check out the video here. The two minutes are worth it for amusement value alone, if you get a kick out of Tuchman’s timid posture while holding a rifle that clearly terrifies him. As reporter David Hookstead wrote, “I have a younger sister who has a better shooting stance than Tuchman and she rarely fires a weapon.”

CNN titled the video “An Up Close Look at the AR-15,” but a more honest one would be “Anti-AR-15 Propaganda with Scary-Sounding words.”

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Tuchman’s voice-over is like Rod Serling introducing one of the weirder episodes of “The Twilight Zone” – replete with lines like “it is a weapon designed to inflict maximum damage.”

While Hertling’s supposedly expert commentary includes the utterly banal: “You can buy one. And you should be able to buy one. The problem is when it gets in the hand of the wrong people.”

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And ranges into the hyperbolic: “This weapon in the wrong hands can be more dangerous than most weapons, because of its capability, to do a lot of damage in a short period of time, and be irreversible.”

If by “irreversible,” Hertling means “deadly,” he’s describing most guns in existence – because that’s what guns are for.

Naturally, Twitter commenters had a field day with this particular piece of “journalism.”

The really sad part is, “Anderson Cooper 360” captioned the video like it was seriously doing a public service: “CNN’s Gary Tuchman goes to a shooting range to take an up-close look at an AR-15-style rifle with retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling.”

When all it was really doing was beclowning itself, and a career military man in the process.

It sure isn’t the first time since the Parkland shooting that questionable anti-gun videos have made the rounds, but it’s definitely one of the worst.

And one more reason not to trust the mainstream media for reporting that matters.

Share this story on Facebook to spread the word about this embarrassing video about guns that aired on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360.”

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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He's been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn't need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
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