Media Mythbusters Blog

Cross-posted at Confederate Yankee:

Over the weekend, The Clinton campaign came under fire for a mailing that attacked Barack Obama’s horrific record on guns. The ad was inaccurate — it didn’t go nearly far enough in describing the number and kind of firearms Obama would like to see banned — but as Hillary’s record is every bit as suspect regarding the ubiquitous and yet poorly misunderstood semi-automatic action, I can understand why she wouldn’t want to undercut her own less-than-credible position.

Almost immediately after that story aired, however, Clinton came under fire for the choice of gun used in the add, a rare Mauser 66 with double-set triggers. Rifles with double-set triggers are rare in the United States, but are a feature more common in Europe. The problem was further compounded by the fact that the image was flipped to show the gun as a left-handed model, and the Mauser 66 was never released as a left-handed gun. The picture therefore portrays a gun that has never been made.

This is all very amusing for everyone but the Clinton camp, but you have to wonder if the gaffe wasn’t a gaffe at all.

With literally millions of stock photos to choose from “in the wild,” including hundreds of thousands of hunting rifle photos, including expensively-produced high-resolution photos that typically would be provided by manufacturers for public relations campaigns, the Clinton campaign “accidentally” ends up with a high resolution image of a decades-old rare European firearm for an American political mailer, and compounds that gaffe by flipping the image so that it portrays a gun that was never built?

I’d like to know very much how that picture was selected for the mailer, who selected it, and why they chose that particular photo to mirror image.

It could very well be that the mailer is merely the perfect storm of coincidences.

Or…