Gun in Hillary's mailer is non-existent version of high-end German import, no longer manufactured.

[ProSense]

Clinton mailing's gun gaffe

Senator Hillary Clinton’s mailing attacking Senator Barack Obama’s record on guns appears to include a striking visual gaffe: The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a non-existent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle.

To make matters worse, a prominent gun dealer said, it’s an expensive German gun with customized features that make it clearly European.

“The gun in the photo does not exist,” said Val Forgett III, the president of Navy Arms in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Forgett's company was Mauser’s agent in the United States when the gun was released, and who sold Mauser guns here again in the 1990s. “The bolt is facing to the left side of the receiver, making it a left-handed bolt action rifle, indicating whoever constructed and approved the mailer did not recognize the image has been reversed.”

Forgett said the error would be obvious to sportsmen.

“I find it laughable on its face,” he said. “It’s like a picture of Babe Ruth hitting right-handed.”

The gun's image in Clinton's mailing is below; a correct image of the gun is below.

Other rifle enthusiasts emailed Politico after an image of Clinton’s mailing was posted to this blog.

“I bet the Clinton folks did a mirror flip on the stock image to make it look more ‘aesthetic,’” wrote one, David Phillips. “What a latte-sipping, Gucci-wearing thing to do.”

The Mauser 66, released in 1966 and no longer manufactured, is a high-end hunting rifle that found military use as a sniper rifle. In Clinton’s mailing, it’s pictured with a double-set trigger, a customization that’s popular in Europe, but “almost unheard of in the United States,” Forgett said.

“It’s a $2,200 German import – it’s hardly typical of what the average workingman in Indiana uses,” he said.

More distortion from Hillary:

Hillary Drops New Indiana Mailer Attacking Obama On Guns, "Bitter" Comments

By Greg Sargent - May 4, 2008, 12:10PM

I've just obtained a new mailer that the Hillary campaign has dropped in Indiana that attacks Obama for inconsistency on the Second Amendment -- and also reminds voters of the comments Obama made about small town America that created problems for him in the run-up to Pennsylvania.

(Image)

The mailer says:

And just this month, Barack Obama accused people in rural places and small towns of being "bitter" people who "cling to guns."

Note that the mailer says Obama "accused" folks of this. Here's what Obama said last month:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

The Hillary mailer, in selectively quoting from this, omitted all of Obama's references to people's economic circumstances, leaving the misleading impression that all Obama did was "accuse" rural and small-town Americans of being "bitter" people who "cling to guns."

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