American right-wingers embrace hilarious new gun-control conspiracy theory based on a lie

It had been a while since we had a new conservative meme, so let's embrace this one: Conservatives are angry that Attorney General Eric Holder plans to make them wear "gun tracking bracelets." Which, as you might expect, he doesn't.

Before a House subcommittee, Holder explained that while the Senate was debating new gun control measures last year, he and the vice president met with people who were working on technological innovations in gun manufacturing. "[W]e talked about how guns can be made more safe," he said, as transcribed by the conservative site Washington Free Beacon. "By making them either through fingerprint identification, the gun talks to a bracelet or something that you might wear, how guns can be used only by the person who is lawfully in possession of the weapon."

Holder was talking about things like the Gun Box, a storage device for firearms that can only be opened when the owner passes a radio frequency ID (RFID) chip over it, the sort of thing in your credit cards that lets you tap instead of swiping. The Gun Box embeds its RFID chip in a bracelet. Need your gun? Wave your hand over your storage box and it opens — but your kids and criminals can't gain access.

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That's not the headline the Free Beacon put on its story, as Talking Points Memo noted on Wednesday. Instead, the site went with: "Holder: We Want to Explore Gun Tracking Bracelets." That's the headline that carried over to the conspiracy site InfoWars and to Fox News and to the NRA website. There's no tracking in what Holder referred to, unless you're worried about being tracked by your gun. But if the headline had been "Holder: Let's Make Guns Smarter," all those other sites wouldn't have picked it up.

Sassy wrote:Oh it's amazing how people will believe stuff!