I should have caught this myself, being a former cops reporter and all, but I had to rely on my editor and a certain gun-loving and God-fearing mayor for the heads-up:
The .22-caliber pistol that killed 13-year-old Oles Tromper almost surely wasn't an automatic, as reported by the Sun-Sentinel. It was a semiautomatic, as reported by the Miami Herald. Here's what the mayor, who refers to the Sun-Sentinel as the "scum" (with love and affection, of course), wrote: "the scum even got the gun wrong, saying it was an automatic, which would be illegal to posses without a special permit, The herald got it right with a semiautomatic."
Alright then. It's not a small error, since the presence of a real automatic pistol -- which can fire more than one shot with one pull of the trigger -- would help to explain the multiple gunshot wounds to Tromper. A semi-automatic, on the other hand, fires only one bullet per squeeze, so the 15-year-old, if he accidentally shot Tromper more than once would have a lot more explaining to do.
Oh and while I'm knocking around the scum, I'll go ahead and point out another problem that was spotted by
my NT editor, Tony Ortega. In the newspaper's lead editorial today, the headline goes like this: "Issue: The 'property insurance reform' calvary is coming -- at last."
It repeats the word "calvary" in the text of the editorial: "like the calvary charging over a distant hill ... ". The problem with that is that a "calvary" is a distant hill. The hill outside Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified, to be exact. What the newspaper meant was cavalry, which is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as "troops trained to fight on horseback."
Maybe Bob Coy, the pastor of the monster Calvary Chapel church, has started copy editing for the Sentinel in addition to sometimes off-the-wall Bible column.
