Grammar is all.
The title uses “may,” which is basically the subjunctive in modern English usage, and suggests that she WAS a security guard and it’s POSSIBLE therefore that she would not have been able to use that particular weapon.
However, she was not a security guard, and thus she was simply using a particular weapon that was perfectly legimate for her to use.
Therefore, the headline should have been, “Colorado Heroine Would Have Been Legally Prevented from Using Beretta if a Security Guard.”
The title uses “may,” which is basically the subjunctive in modern English usage, and suggests that she WAS a security guard and it’s POSSIBLE therefore that she would not have been able to use that particular weapon.
However, she was not a security guard, and thus she was simply using a particular weapon that was perfectly legimate for her to use.
Therefore, the headline should have been, “Colorado Heroine Would Have Been Legally Prevented from Using Beretta if a Security Guard.”
You have a point. If I were omniscient, I would have used “would” instead of “may”. I did not have access to the definition in the city ordnance. I wanted to point out the legal difference that I was 99 percent sure of. The original AP article left room for doubt, and I wanted to be precise.
Consider
So the headline reflects, IMHO, two problems with modern US English, we don't know the sequence of tenses in conditional sentences, and we don't know the inflection of the verb "may".
IMHO, when language loses the ability to make distinctions, it loses something inmportant. There's an real difference between "She MAY not be able," and "She MIGHT no be able", but the uses of the tenses of "may" is vanishing, so we're having to find different ways to draw that distinction.
In this "headline", what we have is a hypothesis contrary to fact. Here's a restriction on registered security guards. She isn't a registered security guard, so it's not a restriction on how she can be armed. But if she HAD BEEN a registered security guard (which she, in fact, wasn't) then she MIGHT HAVE BEEN (Or, I wouldd htink, would certaianly have been) restricted from carrying her lovely Beretta 92-FS, which is one of the sweetest guns I own, though I prefer my sigp226, and, if I AM ombliged to carry a revolver, I usually carry my S&W 686P.
Don't get me going on grammar and "may" -- instant pedant, AND if I WERE to be disagreed with, I MIGHT draw one of my weapons, though I think I WOULD get more satisfaction from using my knife, up close and personal, than I WOULD from using a gun at some distance.
I trust I make myself obscure.