AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File

I spend a fair bit of my day pouring over headlines. I read a whole lot of them day in, day out, all dealing with firearms. Most aren’t worth writing about for whatever reason. Others are duplicates of stories I’ve already written about. Still, others are local crimes that, based on past traffic, you guys don’t really care about all that much.

However, earlier today, I came across a headline that annoyed me to no end. “Police: Suspects used semi-automatic guns to rob victims in Nutbush,” the headline reads.

Two guys in Memphis pulled up behind a truck as it was being loaded. Then the two guys got out of their car and robbed the other party.

No big deal. However, as the headline notes, they used–GASP!–semiautomatic weapons!

As the article notes further down, however:

The suspects were armed with semi-automatic handguns. Both were wearing black shorts and white sandals.

In other words, they were armed with the most popular category of handgun on the market.

Look again at that headline for a moment. While they’re paraphrasing the police, let’s be honest for a moment here. The only reason to include the guns being semi-automatic is to create fear.

All around us, the media has decided that semi-automatic weapons are scary and need to be banned. Either this headline was crafted to add to that, or it’s the result of someone who has already succumbed to that hysteria.

Semi-automatic weapons aren’t some new technology. The first successful semi-automatic weapon was the Mannlicher Model 85 developed in 1885, more than 140 years ago. The Schönberger-Laumann 1892, developed less than a decade later, is considered by many to be the first semi-automatic pistol.

In other words, the semi-automatic action is 19th-century technology with a few updates and little else. They were legal and common throughout the 20th century, most of which were free from things like mass shootings.

Why is it only now that semi-autos are considered too dangerous for ordinary citizens to own and possess?

The answer is simple. Gun grabbers tried banning AR-15s, and similar military-style rifles based on cosmetic differences and gun makers figured a way around that. They know if they tried to do the same thing again, gun makers would do the same thing again. So, they figure if they want to take away things like the AR-15, they have to go deeper. They’re going after the action-type itself because they know we’ll work around anything else.

Where gun grabbers run into a problem is that the technology they’re trying to ban is almost a century and a half old. Once people come to understand that, it’s a lot harder for them to support a semi-auto ban.

But that won’t stop the media from continuing their attacks, nor any effort to drum up support for a semi-auto ban. To do that, though, they have to do a better job of convincing people that semi-autos are too dangerous for us to own than we do of pointing out how old and proven the technology is.

Unfortunately, they’ve got the bigger platforms.