HBO "Real Sports" and host Bryant Gumbel had a message it wanted to send about the AR-15, and the show used acclaimed gun inventor Jim Sullivan to do it.
And Sullivan is not happy about it.
"They didn't lie about what I said," Sullivan wrote in
The Federalist, "they just omitted key parts, which changed the meaning."
And by leaving out those two key parts in its segment titled
"AR-15, Modern Sporting Rifle," not only did "Real Sports" distort Sullivan's meaning to make its point, but it also made the AR-15 inventor sound like somebody who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Sullivan wrote an op-ed piece for The Federalist on Tuesday to call out the show for misrepresenting "much of what I said" about the most popular rifle in the U.S.
On the segment, Sullivan is quoted saying, the AR-15 is "more lethal than any cartridge that was fired by any army in history," omitting this key phrase from Sullivan:
"… when firing semi-auto only."
The show also omitted this from Sullivan: "The select fire M16 on full auto is of course more effective."
"They were apparently trying to make the AR-15 civilian model seem too dangerous for civilian sales," Sullivan wrote in The Federalist.
Further, Sullivan wrote that he objected to the dialogue on military and hunting bullets.
"The interviewer pretended not to understand the relevance that, due to the Hague convention, military bullets cannot be expanding hollow points like hunting bullets."
Sullivan wrote that ArmaLite, a small arms engineering company, made bullets that were in compliance with the Hague Convention.
"This gave us a small cartridge that was half the size, weight, and recoil of a 7.62 NATO," Sullivan wrote, "so the soldier could carry twice the ammo, fire controllable full auto, and be far more deadly out to 300 yards, the three characteristics that determine military rifle cartridge effect."
Ray Stallone, an HBO spokesman, disputed Sullivan's claims.
"Real Sports fairly and accurately represented Mr. Sullivan’s interview in our report,"Stallone told Newsmax in a statement. "Mr. Sullivan says that we 'omitted key parts' of his comments on the lethality of the civilian AR-15 as compared to that of the fully-automatic military version.
"That claim is untrue," he said.
"Mr. Sullivan's comments in the interview were in line with those he had made in phone conversations with HBO producers in the weeks prior to the on-camera interview.
"Mr. Sullivan, in his remarks on TheFederalist.com, also says that Real Sports' David Scott 'pretended not to understand' the difference in the bullets used in military use of the gun as compared to hunting use," Stallone told Newsmax. "Again, this is not the case."
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