The problem many people have with NPR isn’t that they’re liberal. We’re used to that from the mainstream media.

No, what bothers us is that they count on taxpayer money and still try to destroy our basic civil liberties.

NPR has long advocated for gun control, but a recent story went way too far.

The story is about the coroner in Uvalde and the trauma he experienced. That, in and of itself, is definitely newsworthy and the man has my most heartfelt sympathies. I can’t imagine what that must have been like.

I have no issue with that part.

What bothers me is what I saw in NPR’s tweet on the subject.

The AR-15 is designed to blow targets apart. Its bullets travel with such velocity that they can decapitate an adult.

Unfortunately, this Uvalde coroner has now seen first-hand what the weapon can do to children.https://t.co/LjxAps68UP

— NPR (@NPR) June 1, 2022

The AR-15, which is the weapon used by the gunman at Robb Elementary, is designed to blow targets apart. It’s a weapon built for war. And when fired into a human adult body, its bullets travel with such fierce velocity that they can decapitate a person, or leave a body looking “like a grenade went off in there,” as Peter Rhee, a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona, told Wired. The carnage the weapon leaves behind has become a signature of school shootings and other mass shootings across the country.

Now, let’s understand something. What the coroner saw may have been the crux of the article, but NPR opted to use their Twitter post to highlight this.

And it’s nonsense.

The .223 or 5.56 round isn’t a particularly large or powerful round. While it’s a fast round, there are faster out there.

It’s also a round that’s illegal to use in many states to hunt game such as deer. Why? Because it’s not powerful enough to humanely kill the animal.

But let’s take a look at that link in the quote, the one that talks about decapitating people.

A copy of the survey, which was published in a Gawker story by my now-colleague Sam Biddle in 2016, shows that Viet Cong fighters hit with the weapon were frequently decapitated and dismembered, many looking as though they had “exploded.” A field report documented how an AR-15 had blown up a man’s head and turned another’s torso into “one big hole.” The weapon was lauded by soldiers on the battlefield for its effectiveness at killing adversaries and even cutting through dense jungle forest.

That’s all very fascinating, but having grown up in the post-Vietnam era and having talked to guys who were there, very few of them were fans of the platform–though they all carried M-16s, not AR-15s which are different weapons.

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. Take the word of people who were there.

“We called it the Mattel 16 because it was made of plastic,” said Marine veteran Jim Wodecki in the video below. “At that time it was a piece of garbage.”

It weighed about half as much as the AK-47 Kalashnikov and fired a smaller bullet – the 5.56 mm round. In short, the troops didn’t have faith in the rifle’s stopping power.

Doesn’t sound like troops lauding anything, does it?

See, the problem is that NPR went with reports posted by other journalists and anti-gun activists’ comments rather than, you know, talking to anyone who actually knows anything about guns. This was a willful decision and it can only be because they wanted the scary description of the AR-15’s lethality to sway people.

In other words, this isn’t the report of what the coroner dealt with anymore, it’s anti-gun propaganda funded in part with your tax dollars. Yes, he saw awful things, but you’re looking at the results of a round fired at close range and, in far too many cases, at a fairly small target. It’s not because the AR-15 fires a cruise missile that will murder-death-kill anything and everything.