I recall one point that Rachel made -- I don't know if it was in this particular segment -- was that the gun issue is "ungoogleable", due to the amount of misinformation that is out there on gun blogs and gun propaganda websites. Her point is that in order to get to the facts, you need to do old-school non-google research -- for example, to figure out what happened in the "plastic guns" episode, you need to actually go back to news articles and reports written at the time, because the version of the story that you get from the gun blogs (the version that you have just repeated) is utterly unreliable.

For example, in the course of disproving some NRA talking points that gejohnston was repeating, I happened upon an AP article from 1986 that discussed a report from the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment about plastic guns:

Now, I bet you never heard of this particular report. And why would you have? The gun blogs where you get your information have no interest in presenting an even-handed or factual account of this issue.

To be honest, I didn't know about this report either. I was ready to accept the possibility that Rachel was mistaken. But it didn't seem likely. On one hand, it has been my experience that almost nothing that pro-gunners claim turns out to actually be true. On the other hand, Rachel Maddow is an intelligent, skilled journalist, who I have found to be very trustworthy on a variety of issues, who has a reputation to protect and thus a vested interest in being accurate, and who has access to a professional staff and also a lot of sources of information besides just google.


Oh, and, by the way, if you read the whole transcript, you will see that the point here was not to show that plastic guns pose an "imminent danger which must be addressed". As she pointed out very clearly, this issue already has been addressed several decades ago. And it was also not to conflate the Glock that Loughner used with the "Glock 7" from Die Hard.

No, the point was to show that, despite the fact that the Republican party is wholly in the pocket of the gun lobby, and that the NRA will oppose just about any restriction on guns, no matter how slight the imposition on gun owners or how great the potential for saving lives, despite all that, the conventional wisdom that any form of gun control is a political non-starter is mistaken:

You might disagree with her. Maybe you think that the gun lobby is too powerful. Fair enough. But don't misrepresent her argument.