That damn load of iron ore again

Given the usual hilarity on offer at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network when libruls display their ignorance of stuff that goes bang or boom:

"It's so adorable when people who wouldn't know a high-capacity magazine from Vanity Fair start telling gun owners what they should want and need."

"The lead sponsor of a bill to ban high-capacity magazines for firearms dismissed concerns that the tens of millions of such devices already in use would render her ban pointless by explaining that that the existing ones would be used up in time. ... Like the colossal gaffe by former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin in last year’s Show Me State Senate debacle, this is evidently something that DeGette actually believes or believed until she became the object on nationwide mockery."

... would it be rude to point out that the Yamato-class battleships actually displaced (as the story backhandedly points out) somewhere in the neighborhood of 73,000 tons? That's thousand with a T, as in "Try having your desk pay attention to something other than the Two Minutes Hate for a change."

This is the sort of thing that happens when writers forget to sing along with Gordon Lightfoot as they hurry through the day's projects. It happened even when news organizations had libraries with encyclopedias and Who's Who and ancient copies of Jane's Fighting Ships -- and copy editors who would use them whenever certain bylines popped up on the screen. Errors will be with us always, but some slips are more schadenfreudian than others.