During last Thursday’s broadcast of the CBS mystery series Elementary, a modernized take on Sherlock Holmes, we got yet another woeful example of the anti-gun foolishness we see on network TV. In the case of this show we not only got another I hate guns speech from the star of the show, we also got a whole lot of bull crap presented as gun “facts.”
Now, in this series the main character played by English actor Johnny Lee Miller, presented as a genius, is chasing down a murderer who used a gun to kill several people. As the plot trudged onward to the final chapter, Sherlock Holmes noted that they found out about the gun used in the crime. At one point, Holmes says he had “traced back to a private trader at a gun show in Virginia.”
But before he continued about this purported “tracing,” Holmes snarked about how monstrous America was because you could buy a gun from a gun dealer at a gun show and skip all that darned ol’ background checking and paperwork.
This is, of course, a total lie. Every gun dealer has to perform a background check no matter where they are selling their guns. Now, in many states it is true that a private individual can sell a gun to another private individual without performing a background check. But it is not true that a gun dealer can skip background checks. No gun dealer can sell a gun without paperwork.
Through the anti-gun writers of the show, the “genius” Holmes was simply lying in this case.
But that was the least of the lies about guns in this segment of Elementary. As Eric Soderstrom notes, the whole claim is bogus.
The plot point that the police “traced back to a private trader at a gun show in Virginia” is simply nonsense.
You see, in the show the police do not have the firearm in hand. What Sherlock was claiming is that they somehow matched the shells at two previous crimes to the same gun. But the fact is, unless the police had the gun itself in order to make ballistics tests, what the character said they could do is simply nonsense.
Soderstopm has a lot more detailed info on this point, but the show is also wrong to say that the police could have traced the gun so quickly to a gun dealer in Virginia.
But the contempt with which “Sherlock Holmes” says “and God bless America” at the end of this confused and fact-free gun segment says it all.
The show, its writers, stars and producers hate this country.
But at least Lucy Liu is worth looking at.
