Let me be clear, I was not talking about the article in the OP. I was talking specifically about the loosely used term "High Caliber" which, if you google it, appears in hundreds of articles involving guns in popular news media without explanation other than we're supposed to know that it means something amorphously dangerous.sjfcontrol wrote:TAM -- you DO realize the phrase was "high powered", not "high caliber", right?The Annoyed Man wrote:Almost any article written these days, even in Texas, describes any Glock (or pretty much any other carry gun) as "High Caliber." I still don't know what that means—beyond it being clear cut evidence of a drama queen reporter overly enamored with the sound and utterance of their own deluded vocabulary. Evidently, the writers have never heard of a .600 Nitro Express, or a .375 H&H Magnum, compared to which a 9mm or .45 ACP are pretty small potatoes.RoyGBiv wrote:High-powered.!!! That cracks me up.
What a namby-pamby article. Sounds like Mike Bloomberg wrote it himself.
Does anybody have a clear definition (outside of the gun-grabbing media) of what "High Caliber" means? If so, please enlighten me.
That said, 'high powered' is equally misused. Reporters will call an AR15 a "high-powered assault rifle." Those of us in the gun-world will typically attack the use of the term "assault rifle" because it is factually an incorrect term. BUT, we'll let the term 'high-powered' with regard to the .223/5.56 cartridge slip right on by. But as anyone knows who has fired a variety of rifles, 'high-powered' is a very relative term, and the .223/5.56 cartridge is at the lower end—indeed, near the bottom—of the rifle cartridge power spectrum. A reporter who calles an AR15 a 'high-powered' rifle, is a reporter who has never even seen a rifle cartridge in .270 or .308, let alone .30-'06, which is where the descriptive "high-power" actually begins to be true.
It is nothing more than the dramatization of the mundane in order to gin up outrage. It isn't enough to shock. A reporter needs to manufacture outrage, because that outrage turns what would be a one time article into an 'investigative series', which in turn sells more papers or page hits, etc., etc.