A Georgia man was recently arrested in New York City. His crime? Having a firearm. Apparently, that was all.

Well, he had more than one firearm. Frankly, I don’t have any sympathy for the man, either. After all, we all know that NYC is a no-go zone for legal guns. If you take a firearm into the city without permission, you deserve whatever may happen.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the rules are stupid and need to die a fiery death, but those are the rules, and you either play by them or get what’s coming if you get caught.

What really tickles me is the media’s fascination with the word “arsenal.” From WSB-TV’s story:

A Georgia man was arrested Monday in New York at a parking garage above the Port Authority Bus Terminal for keeping an arsenal of weapons in his car, including two handguns, dozens of bullets and a machete.

…

The police found two unloaded 9mm handguns, 138 rounds of ammunition, including 60 hollow-point bullets, a machete and a hatchet in his car, the New York Daily News reported.

Yeah.

First, an arsenal is defined, for our purposes here, as, “a collection of weapons.” Obviously, this means more than one. However, let’s also face facts here. In no other place would we count two of anything as a collection. If someone collects baseball cards and tells us they only have two, we kind of laugh at them.

The same for comic books, or coasters, or literally anything else. Two of anything barely counts as possessing things, much less collecting them.

Now, if these were particularly rare or interesting guns, I could see it.

After all, if the two baseball cards you owned were Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb’s rookie cards, I’d reconsider laughing. The same if the two comics you have are the first appearances of Superman and Batman. If these guns were, say, a World War II marked Luger and an early High Power or literally anything interesting, maybe.

However, that’s not what we hear here. We just hear that there were two 9mm handguns. Sorry, but that’s not an arsenal by any stretch. Even with a machete handy.

Further, let’s talk about round count for the journalists out there.

138 rounds isn’t a lot of ammunition. At all.

Seriously, I burn through twice that when I’m at the range just screwing around with friends. That’s not even a good warm up on a serious training day. Especially when full metal jacket (FMJ) tends to come 50 rounds to a box. Hollow-points can come in either 20-round boxes or 50 round boxes. So what we see here is a little under a box and a half worth of ammunition.

In other words, not all that much.

Unfortunately, journalists tend to hear “138 bullets” and freak. They seem to believe that every round represents one potential murder, but that’s not how it works. If that were true, every gang banger with a Glock would get 15-17 kills with each magazine, and that doesn’t happen. It really would have blown their minds to know that I get 1,000 round cases shipped to my house. They’d swear I was going to massacre half the town when really, the only lives being taken were the unfortunate gnats who landed on the wrong piece of paper or steel at the range.

Maybe there needs to be a “Gun Guide For Journalists.” The question is, would they recognize they need such a thing?