With that said, too few journalists have a solid understanding of guns and gun violence. Here are three major things the media gets wrong.

1. Semi-automatic rifles are not battlefield weapons or machine guns.

Failing to understand the difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons is probably the most common and most amateur mistake journalists have made when reporting on guns.

CNN’s Piers Morgan has been one of the most vocal media personalities advocating for more gun control, and has not let his apparent trouble with grasping this distinction get in the way of his crusade.

The following is from Piers’ July 23, 2012 broadcast (shortly after the Aurora shooting), in which gun rights advocate and author John Lott, Jr. explained what a semi-automatic rifle is:

LOTT: OK. You said a civilian version of the gun. OK. Basically what that means is it’s the same as any other hunting rifle or any other rifle in terms of inside guts. One trigger, one bullet goes out. It’s not the same weapon that militaries would go and use.

MORGAN: How did he fire off so many rounds then?

LOTT: Because he pulled the trigger many times.

The excerpt below is from Piers this month, talking to Fordham University law professor Nicholas Johnson, still confused about the capability of a semi-automatic civilian model AR-15 rifle:

MORGAN: Right. Because AR-15 with 100 bullets in a minute and somebody like the shooter in Aurora, Holmes, used a magazine with 100 bullets and an AR-15, they are effectively machine guns. Are they? I mean —

JOHNSON: No, they are not.

The difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic is one of those things best explained visually, and this video does a great job of it (in under two minutes). I’d recommend it for anyone covering gun policy who is still unclear as to the distinction between the two.

As a semi-automatic rifle such as the civilian AR-15 and its derivatives can only fire one round per trigger pull, Morgan’s “100 bullets in a minute” math doesn’t seem to be physically feasible, even with a rare 100-round drum that would require no pauses to swap magazines. (Magazines holding 30 rounds are the most common among AR-15 owners, although in California capacity is restricted to 10.)

Fully automatic weapons like machine guns, which actually can fire 100 rounds per minute, have been (with extremely rare and complicated exception) illegal for civilians to own since the passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934.

2. Assault weapon bans target guns based on appearance, and not on any higher destructive potential or disproportionate influence on gun violence.

Because, as pointed out above, semi-automatic military-style rifles are functionally the same as semi-automatic hunting-style rifles, assault weapons legislation restricts guns based on their outfits and not on their outputs. To wit, the following language in the California Penal Code was part of its currently active Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989:

(a)Notwithstanding Section 12276, “assault weapon” shall also mean any of the following:

(1)A semiautomatic, centerfire rifle that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and any one of the following:

(A)A pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon.

(B)A thumbhole stock.

(C)A folding or telescoping stock.

(D)A grenade launcher or flare launcher.

(E)A flash suppressor.

(F)A forward pistol grip.

The only one of these features that actually impacts the destructive capability of the weapon is the grenade launcher, but explosive grenades have been banned since the same law restricting machine guns went into effect almost 80 years ago. Everything else is essentially cosmetic.

The expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which President Obama would like to see reinstated in an updated form, had largely the same classifications. New York’s recently passed gun bill, which goes the furthest of any state with a seven-round magazine limit, also bans any semi-automatic pistol or rifle with a “military-style feature.” This is all a ban on assault weapons is — a glorified dress code.

Vice President Biden, who is heading the president’s task force on guns, acknowledges most shooting deaths are tied to handguns, but even among spree shooters, assault rifles have hardly been a uniquely dangerous presence. The deadliest school shooting in American history, Virginia Tech, was committed with handguns. The D.C. sniper used a bolt-action hunting rifle.

3. States with higher rates of gun ownership do tend to have higher rates of gun violence, but it’s important not to confuse this correlation with causation.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein pointed out the South’s relatively high murder rate in a piece published shortly after Sandy Hook. The South is also the region where gun ownership is most widespread.

Klein cited work from Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy in making that point, and provided a link to more of Healy’s charts, including this one comparing historical rates of assault death across states.

Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas have high rates of gun ownership and high rates of gun violence. However, drawing a connection between hunters in the Ozarks and gang crime in Little Rock is tenuous at best. Alabama has a lot of guns because it has hunters and a long history of gun culture. This is not necessarily why it has a lot of gun violence.

Richard Florida of The Atlantic dug deep into data two years ago and found a strong correlation between poverty and homicide rate when comparing states. I found the same when comparing countries last year. Florida’s analysis did reveal a somewhat weaker negative correlation between an assault weapons ban and gun crime, but as only four states — all of which skew wealthy — have such bans, only so much should be read into that data point.

Utah and Minnesota have high rates of gun ownership but among the lowest homicide rates in the country. Illinois is 44^th in gun ownership and 10^th in assault deaths, with its main city of Chicago notorious for its high murder rate. In these exceptions to the general trend, poverty and the relative strength of social institutions seem to be more of a predictor of gun violence than gun ownership.

A surface-level understanding of gun culture and data without context do not combine to make a strong argument. Any journalist seeking to properly cover this complicated issue would be wise to follow a version of the Fourth Law of Gun Safety: keep your finger off the trigger until you know what it is you’re targeting.

Convention City: For the next two weeks, we’ll be barraged with reportage from the Republican and Democratic national conventions. As MediaShift points out, a lot of attention among media observers will be paid to how a variety of digital tools are deployed, much like it was during the Summer Olympics. The media industry blog has already put together a helpful list of resources for following the conventions. Meanwhile, the Washington Post has launched a new feature it’s calling The Grid, which is an interesting way to scan through all their various social media and reporting channels and get the latest on the RNC (and next week the DNC).

Instagraphic: In case you missed it (which seems impossible), Instagram moved to the center of a century-old debate this weekend following the shootings at the Empire State Building. When user @ryanstryin posted a graphic photo showing one of the victims lying in the street, it prompted a lot of reflection from both the mainstream media and the public over whether it’s appropriate to publish or share such images. We’ve had these arguments since the advent of photography – in times of war, in times of peace – on whether to publish photos of the dead and wounded or withhold them out of respect for the victims and their families. But this was a special kind of wake-up call. The media no longer makes these decisions, now that witnesses have a publishing platform in their pocket. New media commentator and J-school prof Jeff Jarvis got a little hot under the collar defending his own decision to share the photo on his Twitter stream and offers a compelling argument on the side of keeping the news unfiltered. The point is, if you click this hyperlink showing a victim with blood streaming down the sidewalk (republished here by Slate), you’ve already been forewarned by the linked words. Since mainstream media still have the broadest reach, they will continue to find themselves at the center of this debate, but the audience is going to find it increasingly difficult to avoid such material. The decision will be not one for the “broadcaster” on whether to share, but a personal one on whether to click.

Streaming the world 60 seconds at a time. The Wall Street Journal is now asking its reporters to file microvideo reports using the social media video platform Tout. They’re calling it WorldStream. From Tampa to Syria, you can see snippets of life, the news, and everything else a reporter can capture with a mobile phone camera. A first dive leaves me with the impression that much, much work has yet to be done before WSJ’s WorldStream can be called a mature product. Rebels relaxing in a mosque in Syria might have been portrayed better with a photo, for instance. Thirty seconds watching a pan of the empty delegate center in Tampa would have been better spent reading an actual story about the convention. And I can’t help but wonder what you can expect to get out of a 60-second interview with a pol – the format seems more suited to TMZ celeb shots and gotcha journalism. It will be interesting to see how the service evolves. For now, my main impression is that we’re looking at the news equivalent of Romantic fragment poems – Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” or Keats’ “Hyperion.” They may work artistically, but are story fragments really the best approach for an industry devoted to informing and enlightening its audience?

Social media is bull$#!t. Or so says B.J. Mendelson in the title of his new book. The former social media marketer and contributor to Mashable boosts his own contrarian view after serving the industry for years. Among some of the more common precepts of online journalism Mendelson disputes: the all-importance of pageviews, that Facebook really has 800 million users, and that we’ve learned much new about Internet marketing since Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” He tells journalist Ernie Smith that the biggest BS thing about social media is “the concept that what’s happening on these very different platforms, with their comparatively small and different audiences, has resonance with what’s happening with the rest of us. This false hope we’re giving people, which not coincidentally popped up around the same time the economy cratered. People needed something to believe in, and selfish and greedy marketers were ready to give that to them in the package of the myth of social media.” Incidentally, the interview is a nice display of what you can do with Jux, yet another platform for quick blogging.

The problem with open data. Is there one? Some interesting conversations on the topic this week. One started when the White House announced the selection of its “Innovation Fellows,” members of the private and nonprofit sectors and academia whose job it will be to help develop five government programs, including one on open data. That announcement sparked some backlash from conservative commentators, including Michelle Malkin, who wondered whether this isn’t really just a waste of taxpayer money. Open government reporter Alex Howard captured some of that debate, which unfolded in the social media sphere. Meanwhile, techPresident’s David Eaves reported on how a government spending scandal uncovered in the U.K. with the help of an open data project raises as many questions about how government collects and reports its data as it does about the suspect spending. So, what do you do if the government’s databases are poorly coded or managed – how do we get the government to change? And even if you discover these remarkable stories with the aid of open data sources, does it make it any easier to act? More questions like these are sure to present themselves as data journalism flowers into a discipline in its own right.

Another decade of the Internet. I leave you with a fun look back at how much the Internet has changed in the past 10 years, courtesy of this Mashable infographic. Enjoy.