President Trump ordered the Justice Department not to appeal a court ruling that loosened restrictions on firearms known as "gangster weapons," sources familiar with the matter told CBS News, a move that will let some Americans possess or sell short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and silencers with less government oversight.
That is the same rhetorical trick they used to apply “assault weapons” to them, as “high-powered rifle” to any sort of rifle and “Saturday night special” to any sort of handgun in earlier days.
This time, however, the media has spent at least fifty years making gangsters seem cool. Longer than that; you can trace it to the ‘30s in Hollywood movies. Yet definitely since The Godfather and the Scorsese era; and as for the world of music, ‘gangster’ just means ‘cool’ after 30 years of Snoop and Ice Cube, to name just two of hundreds.
‘That gun is gangster!’
2 comments:
"gangster weapons" may not be too far afield while still making the same distorting error the earlier "assault weapon" did. Gat is a long-standing slang term, typically for long-barreled .38 revolvers, broadened to (or maybe narrowed from) 1920s and depression era Tommy guns.
"Gangster," on the other hand, isn't universally accepted as a complement. Dwight Manfredi, for instance, objected to being called gangster when his newly hired driver tried to compliment him by calling him gangster (as opposed to a gangster).
Eric Hines
The UK speaks of "Zombie Knives"... it's not clear to me there is any valid definition or description of these versus other blades.
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