About six hours ago, USA Today put out one of the dumbest tweets of all time. It is provoking considerable hilarity online, which you can catch up on at Twitchy. First, a word of explanation.
The inability of liberal media outlets to write intelligently about guns is notorious. Liberal reporters and editors have strong opinions about firearms, but few if any of them know anything about either guns or firearms laws. Observers have generally assumed that this USA Today tweet is an extreme example of that media ignorance. The tweet purports to explain what Devin Kelley’s AR-15 looked like, and how it might hypothetically be modified:
A look at the gun used in the Texas church shooting. https://t.co/xdxIf5fR77 pic.twitter.com/sUY1mCCLZC
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 8, 2017
In case you missed it, here is a screen shot of the suggested modification that has caused so much amusement:
No doubt, that is pretty funny. But here is the thing: I don’t believe that there is a single person in the world dumb enough to seriously believe that anyone could, or would want to, attach a chain saw to the underside of a rifle and use it as a bayonet. Certainly no one who researched modifications to AR-15s–a subject on which a great deal has been written–would come up with a chainsaw bayonet.
I think that some millennial employed (until now) by USA Today thought it would be funny to pimp his employer by including that laughable “aftermarket option” in the tweet. I suspect that whoever did it will be out of a job as of tomorrow.
This is perhaps similar to the incident a few days ago, where a Twitter employee on his last day before leaving the company deleted President Trump’s account. The common denominator: a millennial with modest technical skills, a sense of humor, and little concern about future employment. These are tiny data points, but I take them, together, as an instance of how our world is spinning out of control.
UPDATE: USA Today apparently hasn’t yet reclaimed its Twitter account from the jokester who came up with the chainsaw bayonet:
Likewise with the baguette bayonet. It’s only a concept!
One of these days a USA Today editor will catch on.
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