July 01, 2013 10:16 AM UTC

Misinformation Reigns As Gun Safety Laws Take Effect

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• by: Colorado Pols

(Bumped up for the holiday weekend by popular demand – Pols)

7NEWS reports:

Ammunition magazine limits and universal background check requirements are set to take effect in Colorado on Monday, even as county sheriffs fight to overturn the new laws in court.

But after months of tense debate among state officials, the signature pieces of Colorado Democrats' gun control legislation are moving from abstract to tangible.

Some gun stores already are stocking smaller magazines to comply with the 15-round limit. [Pols emphasis] And in the coming months, the public will see how the expansion of background checks to private and online sales will work.

Ever since the passage of landmark gun safety legislation this year in the Colorado General Assembly, we have tried in this space to sort out fact from fiction as gun right supporters made wild claims about what these bills would actually do–and local media generally repeated those claims without question. Today, as these laws finally take effect, the public continues to be grossly misinformed by local press on their true effects. Much of this appears to be the result of one man, Dave Kopel of the right-wing Independence Institute, who simultaneously acts as the media's "expert" on gun policy while he leads the lawsuit against these new laws.

This weekend, a story in the Denver Post by Ryan Parker, who we have already called out for uncritically reprinting gun lobby falsehoods, took the misinformation to a new level: 

At the Firing Line gun shop in Aurora, assorted guns are marked with red tags reading: "Not for sale after June 30." [Pols emphasis]

"We can sell the gun, but we won't be able to sell the magazine with it, so what's the point?" store manager Richard Taylor said…

A preliminary injunction hearing for parts of the law banning high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds — including the "readily converted" language, which could apply to removable base plates — is set for July 10.

"Parts of the (magazine ban) law are so vaguely written, sheriffs are unsure which magazines are legal and which are illegal," Kopel said.

For starters, this latest story from Ryan Parker totally ignores the technical guidance memo from Attorney General John Suthers on the magazine limit law, which very clearly interprets the bill's language, and puts to rest the nonsense about "removable baseplates" and which magazines would be "designed to be readily converted" into a high capacity magazine. And as we've said over and over, in every state where magazine capacity has been limited–Colorado is not the first state to enact this–compliant magazines are available. The claim from Kopel's boss Jon Caldara that "guns in Colorado will never be able to get a magazine again," which Kopel has never been asked to justify, is simply not supported by the facts. Yet here we have the state's newspaper of record subsidizing it!

We reported in early June that Gov. John Hickenlooper has requested a temporary injunction binding enforcement of the magazine limit to the terms of the AG's memo, which is all that proponents want. Again, nobody wants the draconian, speculative interpretations of this law suggested by opponents to be the standard. But Parker omits this as well, and only reports that Kopel is seeking an injunction to halt enforcement of the law entirely.

Saturday's Denver Post ran Parker's story on the front page, with a photo of a row of AR-15 type rifles labeled "not for sale after June 30th." But the truth is that compliant magazines are available for every one of those guns, and AR-15s are still legal for sale today. In short, the Post's front page Saturday amounted to a wholesale deception of its readers. The omissions and factual errors are so pervasive that they truly appear to be intentional. The only purpose we can identify for this story is no incite anger among gun owners and supporters of gun rights, while omitting all of the details that would mitigate that anger. To say this is not journalism is an understatement.

We can't tell you why the Denver Post's newsroom has chosen to so egregiously misreport the gun safety debate this year, but it is increasingly undeniable that they have an agenda other than objective journalism. The Post's editorial board has been a moderate voice in the debate over gun safety legislation this year, and has fact-checked some false claims from the gun lobby that the newsroom has missed. Meanwhile, as we've discussed, the Post's newsroom, led by avowed conservative political news editor Chuck Plunkett, has drilled on factual errors and gaffes by Democrats in multi-day feature stories–yet allowed opponents to claim basically any crazy thing they want without any kind of equivalent fact-checking. Each of these incidents generated its own isolated criticism.

With this latest round of front-page misinformation, it's time to suggest that it isn't "isolated."