What I find interesting is the confluence of media ignorance.
The police were not shot at with 'hunting rifles' they were shot with a birdshot loaded shotgun. Huge difference....and the reason that there were wounds rather than fatalities.
"What I find interesting is the confluence of media ignorance.
The police were not shot at with 'hunting rifles' they were shot with a birdshot loaded shotgun. Huge difference....and the reason that there were wounds rather than fatalities"
The ignorance is caused by a translation difficulty.
In France, hunting weapons (I am chosing the word carefully) are not registered, and one does not need a license to have them. In American, a "hunting rifle" and a "shotgun" are different things. But in French, the standard word for a gun that is not a handgun or a machine gun, a rifle, is "fusil".
The French word for shotgun is also "fusil".
So, if one were reading a French report and saw that someone was hit with light pellets from a "fusil", and perhaps did an online translation, one would discover that the English said that he was hit with pellets from a hunting rifle. And indeed, in French that would be a "fusil" or a "fusil de chasse" or similar.
But so would a shotgun, and the distinction in French would simply be made based on what sort of shot were fired.
If someone just writes "fusil", one does not really know if he is speaking of a rifle or a shotgun. But any translation program is likely to simply translate fusil as "rifle".
And that is how one knows that the reports are translated from French sources. Because in English it is absurd to think of birdshot being fired from a hunting rifle.
Now, I will grant that an editor who understood the rudiments of firearms would arch an eyebrow at the notion of "light pellets fired from a hunting rifle", and would perhaps seek to make sure that "shotgun" wasn't mistranslated.