Media bias related to guns and gun control issues


CNN [is] Not Even Hiding [its] Anti-Gun Agenda Anymore.  The CNN of today isn't doing groundbreaking reporting that literally no one else could do.  Instead, they're pushing an agenda.  In fairness, this isn't new, but with the DOJ report on Uvalde coming out last week, one would think they'd at least focus on what the report actually said.  It outlined law enforcement failures that led to the death of so many innocent children.  That ain't what CNN is pushing, though. [...] Now, we've seen this kind of thing from supposed journalists before.  Anti-gun voices on the news get to say pretty much whatever they want, unchallenged, while anyone who opposes gun control finds themselves in a debate with the host.  This isn't new by any stretch.  Further, it's also just one program on CNN.  One could easily dismiss this as simply a single program or producer or some other entity rather than the network as a whole.  One should not.

Is There a Legitimate Link Between SSRI Antidepressants and Mass Shootings?  With every mass shooting comes a slew of potential culprits, variously offered by pundits depending on their perspectives on gun control:  the guns themselves, violent video games, mental health, social decay, etc.  The debate becomes stale and repetitive very quickly as all retreat to their ideological corners.  The facts of any specific case become a mere footnote.  The one sacred cow culprit that is almost never addressed in the corporate state media — funded heavily as it is by the pharmaceutical industry — is psychotropic drugs like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), commonly referred to in everyday parlance as simply "antidepressants."  (Credit to Matt Walsh as the inspiration for this article; I have followed the seemingly increasingly plausible link between SSRIs and mass shootings for years now, but his recent video on the topic reignited interest on my part in the topic.)  The most recent mass shooter in Maine was reportedly confined to a mental healthcare facility earlier this year as a result of his unstable behavior — a solid move, it would seem, given what he did earlier this week.  Unfortunately, they ultimately released him into the wild, as it were, after only two weeks.

The 10 Mass Shootings Since Lewiston You Didn't Hear About.  Most news articles about the animal in Lewiston, Maine, who shot 31 people, killing 18, focus specifically on the shooter's skin color and "AR-15 style" rifle.  The media seem to have missed the ten mass shootings that have taken place in the three and a half days since the Maine massacre.  Lewiston stands out because of the unusually high body count.  Also, the shooter escaped and was at large for a while before police found his body.  Every news source from Maine to New York kept readers glued to their sites with stories of "the shooter MAY come here next" fear porn.  Legendary jackpudding Joy Behar from "The View" doesn't know the difference between an AR-15 and a bazooka.  She is paid millions of dollars a year to lie to wine-box mommies who believe her codswallop.  [Tweet with video clip]  Left-leaning, gun-grabbing racists cheered when the Lewiston shooter was identified as a white male.  The Lewiston victims were still cooling in the local morgue as commie pundits dutifully went to work decrying the two things they hate the most:  peckerwoods and AR-15s.

Weaponizing Death.  Recently, there has been a spate of horrific murders.  The killers, whether committing mass shootings or single homicides, are hard to stereotype. [...] Unfortunately, these tragedies have increasingly become politicized.  Yet our media and politicians do not apply a common standard of reporting about either the victims, the killers, or the apparent motives and circumstances of the violence.  Instead, each horror is quickly analyzed for its political usefulness.  Then its details are selectively downplayed or emphasized, depending upon the political agenda at work.  A sad example was the terrible murder spree at the private Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.  A transgender male shot and killed six people, including three 9-year-old children.  Almost immediately, three media narratives emerged.  One, semi-automatic weapons, not the killer Audrey Hale, were mostly responsible for the massacre.  Two, the shooter's transgender identity profile played no role in the killing whatsoever.  Three, the public had no need to know of the contents of the shooter's "manifesto."

CNN's Kaitlan Collins Claims 'More Than 200 Mass Shootings in 2023'.  CLAIM:  During CNN's Wednesday town hall with Donald Trump, moderator Kaitlan Collins claimed there have been "more than 200 mass shootings in 2023."  VERDICT:  False, as long as one adheres to the standard definition of a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more individuals were killed by one attacker in one incident.  On May 7, 2023, Breitbart News noted that President Joe Biden made the same claim as Collins, and on May 8, 2023, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeated it.

The media care only about mass shootings that agitate white women.  On Saturday, in Dadeville, Alabama, a Sweet Sixteen party turned into a bloodbath when one of the guests shot 32 people, leaving four dead and 28 injured.  This was the kind of mass shooting that ought to have been the topic of news stories for days, even weeks.  Except, it wasn't.  Sure, the media covered it, but it was maybe a four out of ten on the outrage scale.  There's a reason for that: The shooting seems to have occurred within the black community in a red state, and there's no political hay to be made from that fact.  Initially, the race of the shooter and victims wasn't immediately clear, so you could feel the media getting ready to spring.  Then, it became apparent that the shooter and victims involved in the mass shooting in this small southern town were black.  The first hint was the media's disinterest.

NBC's Chuck Todd Discovers That Black Teenagers Are Shooting Each Other.  Delivering statistics on gun deaths among teenagers, NBC News Chuck Todd discovers that black teenagers are killing each other at a much higher rate than white and asian kids.  Todd is shocked, shocked, at the outcome.  [Video clip]

The media's role in mass shootings.  The past few years have seen long stretches of calm, despite the propaganda from the biased and suspect "Gun Violence Archive," which seeks to label almost every petty crime incident as a "mass shooting" in the mind of the public.  On occasion, the peace is interrupted, with mass shootings taking place at predictable intervals after each miscreant from the previous shooting is elevated in the media to anti-hero status.  This is the well known and well studied phenomenon of media contagion, with each subsequent attack being predictable as clockwork.  So why aren't the nation's socialist media taking responsibility for its actions in causing these tragedies?  Why does it appear that they would rather exploit other people's pain for their political gain than save lives?

Why the Nashville Christian School Shooting Is About to Disappear from the News Cycle.  Unlike the shootings at Michigan State University and East High School in Denver, Colorado, this perpetrator had a handgun and two AR-15-style rifles. [...] As Julio wrote, there is a manifesto and maps of potential targets.  This shooter planned this attack, and given the setting; a hate crime cannot be ruled out.  The lingering question will remain unresolved since a transgender mass shooter is one story the media will avoid like the plague. [...] The shooters at MSU and East High School were black.  This one was transgender.  The shelf life of this heinous school shooting isn't going to last past the week for reasons you already know: the past string of mass shootings does not fit the liberal media narrative.  When the weapon of choice isn't an AR-15 rifle, the clock to expiration starts ticking.  When members of a community the media loathes to expound upon when they're the prime suspects in crimes, especially violent ones, the timeline to move on to the next subject is accelerated immensely.

CNN Uses Misleading Data to Claim over 100 Mass Shootings in 2023.  CNN used misleading data from the Gun Violence Archive to claim Monday "the U.S. has surpassed 100 mass shootings in 2023."  CNN noted, "America reached the grim number by the first week of March."  Both CNN and the Gun Violence Archive departed from the standard definition for mass shootings, which the Rand Corporation observed as being derived from the FBI's 1980s definition of a "mass murderer" of an individual who "kills four or more people in a single incident (not including himself)."

Nets Ignore Michigan State Shooter Had Gun Charge Dropped by Soros-Backed DA.  Late Monday night [2/13/2023], a deranged gunman opened fire on students at Michigan State University, killing three and leaving five others in critical condition.  On Tuesday evening, the three evening news broadcasts were quick to jump to their usual playbook of overblowing how frequent mass shootings in the United States are and turning to guests or victims to plea for gun control.  All three networks used completely dishonest and inflated statistics that there have been 67 mass shootings in the United States in 2023.  Yet ABC's World News Tonight, CBS Evening News & NBC Nightly News had no interest in reporting that the gunman had his prior gun charge dismissed by a George Soros-backed prosecutor in the name of "race equity."  The only mention of the gunman even having a criminal history that banned him from owning a weapon came from NBC Nightly News when Maggie Vespa reported that "investigators highlighting Mcrae's record, most recently pleading guilty to a misdemeanor weapons charge in 2021."

ABC Appalled Armed Robber Got Stopped By Armed Good Samaritan.  Seemingly on the side of criminals, ABC's Good Morning America was appalled on Monday [1/9/2023] after they learned that an armed good Samaritan in Houston, Texas shot and killed an armed robber who was holding up an entire restaurant.  They portrayed the hero as ducking police and the source of the fear in the restaurant that night.  All of this was part of their anti-gun narrative that bars even defensive uses of firearms.

The Associated Press Gets One Right.  I've written more than once that the Associated Press is our number one source of liberal press bias, so this comes as a surprise.  At a time when the Left is trying to use gun control to stave off electoral disaster, the AP unexpectedly gets rational:  [Tweet]  "Avoid assault rifle and assault weapon, which are highly politicized terms..."  Exactly.  There is literally no such thing as an "assault rifle" or "assault weapon."  These are made-up political phrases that have no meaning in the real world.

AP Style Guide Reminds Reporters to Avoid Using 'Assault Weapon,' Calling Term 'Highly Politicized'.  In a Wednesday [7/13/2022] tweet, the Associated Press Stylebook reiterated guidance advising journalists to refrain from using the terms "assault weapon" and "assault rifle," which they call "highly politicized."  "The preferred term for a rifle that fires one bullet each time the trigger is pulled, and automatically reloads for a subsequent shot, is a semi-automatic rifle.  An automatic rifle continuously fires rounds if the trigger is depressed and until its ammunition is exhausted," reads a July 2022 style tip, recommending their usage over more general references to "assault" weaponry.  According to the Stylebook, which is adhered to by newsrooms across the country, the "assault" label "convey[s] little meaning about the actual functions of the weapon."  While the Stylebook change was first made in 2020, conservatives have long derided the modifier as misleading and imprecise.

National Socialist Media:  It's Only A Coincidence We Want To Confiscate Guns Like The Nazis.  We're not supposed to notice that the collectivist actions of one nation's socialist party just happen to mimic the actions of other nation's socialist parties or one particular National Socialist German Workers' Party, that's just a coincidence, don't pay any attention to that.  Have you ever noticed that our esteemed national socialist media spends an inordinate amount of time attacking anyone who dares to compare their collectivist actions to other collectivists?  Have you also noticed that you can be sure a socialist nation has failed when our nation's socialist media suddenly decides that it was somehow, someway 'right-wing'?  Their severe difficulty in always trying to push these lies is that all of these socialist nations have certain characteristics in common that simply don't exist with countries imbued in the pro-freedom right.  The most glaring example is the parallels with the government of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, with gun control.

Videos capture Chattanooga, Philly shoot-outs this weekend.  Multiple dead, including MSM narrative.  This story and the shooting in Philadelphia won't get the mainstream media attention that "mass shootings" get under other circumstances, and we bet you know why.  The start of the Chattanooga shooting was caught in a video that was shared to Facebook.  [Video clip]  News Channel 9 posted that clip, writing:  In the 11-second clip, you can hear more than 20 shots ring out as the woman dives to safety in her car.  Other people can be seen outside the car running away.  The Facebook account Tabby Tab shared several live updates on her page in the early morning hours that show she was in the vicinity of the bar on McCallie Avenue.  The start of the Philadelphia shooting was posted to Twitter.  [Video clips]  And in Chattanooga, the Mayor made this statement, which will pretty much guarantee CNN and MSNBC ignore the story and drop it from their websites as soon as they can get away with it, probably within hours:  ["]This violence is gang related.  Period.  We cannot fix the problem until we are honest about the problem.["]  Yeah.  If it can't be made out as a case of a guilty gun or a guilty "white supremacist" it goes away.

A friendly reminder that many gun control groups routinely inflate school shooting numbers.  [Threat reader]  [Scroll down]  Are these all instances of gun violence?  Yes.  Are they all problematic in their own right?  Yes.  But packaging these as part of some "school shooting" epidemic is dishonest nonsense.  [Indeed], they literally count a cop who shot himself in his own vehicle vaguely near an elementary school.  Presumably overnight.  In mid-JULY. We've got a 25-year-old fatally shot [and I quote here] "near a school playground."  On a Sunday evening.  A 17-year-old fatally shot outside of an elementary school... on Veteran's Day, when school wasn't in session.  It doesn't get less absurd.  They include an instance where, after a night game for an adult league flag football league, a man fatally shot a member of the opposing team because of an on-field dispute... solely because it happened behind an elementary school. [...] We've got an instance where a stray bullet struck a window of an elementary school while no one was inside the building.  We've got "a couple shots fired near a middle school baseball field on a Friday evening while a 20 year old and friends were taking batting practice," apparently not directed at anyone associated with the school, and as far as anyone can tell there were no injuries.  There are bullets hitting the outside wall of a middle school gym in the early morning before anyone was on the campus, likely during an unrelated drive-by shooting.

There Have Been 13 Mass School Shootings Since 1966, Not 27 This Year.  For many people, the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting — which claimed the lives of at least 19 children and two adults — seemed all the more horrible after they learned it was the 27th school shooting so far this year.  That fact makes it harder to view Uvalde as any kind of isolated incident.  An NPR article highlighting this statistic has been shared frequently on social media.  The headline, "27 school shootings have taken place so far this year," probably gave many readers the impression that gun-related killings in schools have been especially high this year, even before Uvalde.  Naturally, the prospect of 26 other previously unnoticed mass shooting events in schools should provoke alarm.  It should also raise eyebrows.  The problem here is that three very differently defined terms are being used somewhat incautiously and interchangeably:  school shooting, mass shooting, and mass school shooting.  Uvalde was a mass school shooting; the 26 previous tragedies at schools this year were not.

Guns, guns, guns.  You likely have read in the press that the United States has an unparalleled number of mass shootings due to our "lax" gun control laws.  Such assertions are rarely challenged, but in fact they are untrue.  I haven't seen more recent numbers, but I am sure little has changed since this 2019 post.  On a per capita basis, our mass shooting rate is quite low.

There was Another Mass Shooting in America.  You Didn't Hear About It Because the Suspect is a Chinese Communist.  [Scroll down]  The Orange County Sheriff's Department tweeted the known facts about the mass shooting on Monday.  "The Laguna Woods church shooting investigation has continued through the night.  Teams continue to process the scene," the sheriff's department said.  "The suspect in the Laguna Woods church shooting has been identified as David Chou, 68 years old, of Las Vegas, NV," the sheriff's department added. [...] Except there is a problem with the narrative:  The suspect isn't a 'white supremacist.'  Nor is he one of the many African-American assailants who have been charged and convicted for attacking Asian-Americans.  The suspect is a Chinese-born man named David Wenwei Chou, a 68-year-old resident of Las Vegas.  His motivation for the mass shooting was described in a hand-written note in Chinese left on a car dashboard, as was reported by the L.A. Times.  "David Wenwei Chou, 68, of Las Vegas, left notes in Chinese in his car stating he did not believe Taiwan should be independent from China, said Orange County Sheriff Don Barnes," the Times reported.

A Tale Of Two Mass Shootings.  In the span of one month, there were two mass shootings.  Both took place in New York.  Both were racially motivated.  Both shooters were violent extremists.  But the media tied only one of them to a mainstream political party.  Can you guess why?  Immediately after the identity of the alleged Buffalo shooter — initially charged with one murder and suspected of killing 10 — became known, the chattering class was insisting that he was not a "lone wolf" and pinned the blame for the massacre on "right-wing extremists" who "control the Republican party."  The Rolling Stone called the 18-year-old Payton Gendron "a mainstream Republican." [...] A Los Angeles Times op-ed declared that "The Buffalo gunman emerged from a far-right ecosystem that's gone mainstream."  New York Times weighed in with an article headlined:  "Replacement Theory, a Fringe Belief Fueled Online, Is Refashioned by G.O.P."

Guess how the Buffalo shooter identified himself politically.  The alleged supermarket killer is self-described as authoritarian left — so why isn't this being reported?  If the alleged Buffalo killer's "manifesto" is authentic, he was deep into communist ideology and now is an authoritarian leftist.  Why is this being kept under wraps?  The teenager accused of murdering ten people last Saturday in Buffalo, N.Y. also allegedly posted a 180-page "manifesto" online that the national media are selectively exploiting, leaving out key facts.

Misinformation About Kyle Rittenhouse Case Floods Social Media, TV Networks.  Kyle Rittenhouse shot three black men.  Kyle Rittenhouse traveled across state lines with a gun.  Kyle Rittenhouse had an AK-47.  These are three examples of false information being spread about Rittenhouse, whose trial ended last week with his acquittal.  Prominent influencers, including lawmakers and reporters, are sources of some of the misinformation — possibly disinformation — leaving experts troubled.  On CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday [11/21/2021], reporter Mark Strassman falsely said Rittenhouse "drove in from Illinois armed for battle."  On CNN's "Cuomo Prime Time" on Friday, Harvard University professor Cornell William Brooks falsely said Rittenhouse was carrying an AK-47.  The Independent falsely reported late last week that Rittenhouse shot three black men.  Rittenhouse, 17 years old at the time, shot three men, two fatally, with an AR-15 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Aug. 25, 2020.  All were white, as is Rittenhouse.  The gun was bought by a friend and was picked up by the teenager, who resided in Illinois, from a home in Kenosha.

There's Been Continual Media Dishonesty in the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial.  Unfortunately, the polarization over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is pretty easy to explain.  There's the relatively benign if misleading reports on Friday by ABC, CBS, & NBC Evening News broadcasts announcing the verdict.  All three outlets called the riots "protests" and avoided saying anything about Rittenhouse being attacked before using his gun.  NBC at least went as far as saying that there were "protests and unrest."  Others went much farther.  On MSNBC, Rutgers Professor Brittney Cooper claimed:  "Today what we were told was that white self-defense trumps everybody else's sense of safety and protection.  Even when white folks are carrying the gun and they are under no threat at all.  As Kyle Rittenhouse admitted himself, he was not threatened.  He didn't think that there was a threat.  He came there to intimidate, and he was allowed to do so."  Of course, Rittenhouse said no such thing.  He clearly said how he was threatened and in fear of his life.  He never even remotely implied that he came there to intimidate anyone.  But the other guest on MSNBC agreed with Cooper, and the host never contradicted her.

Lies, Lies, Lies:  A case study in journalistic malpractice.  When I open my homepage, the first trending story on the top right is:  "Judge allowed Kyle Rittenhouse to draw jurors from a raffle box to determine the 12 who will decide the verdict of his homicide trial." [...] At this point, if I've been scanning Twitter casually for the news, I become alarmed.  The defendant selected his jurors?  The judge allowed him to do this?  It takes me a lot of scrolling to get to that phrase "at random," and then it seems only to apply to the six jurors who will serve as alternates. [...] There is no story here.  It's nothing, a total irrelevancy, a meaningless controversy confected out of thin air.  Confected by whom?  By our press, in collusion with the unaccountable tech corporations that now run our public square.  It's not like they met in some back room to plot it all out.  They don't have to:  they are in total agreement about how this case needs to go.

CNN Has an Unbelievable Take on Your Basic Right to Defend Yourself.  We've seen a lot of bad media takes when it comes to the Rittenhouse case but we can always count on CNN to deliver some more.  This segment with John Berman, Brianna Keilar, and Don Lemon is something else.  [Video clip]  Keilar talks about "white vigilantism" and compares the Rittenhouse case to the Ahmaud Arbery case.  This is offensive because the Rittenhouse case has nothing to do with race and nothing to do with the Ahmaud Arbery case.  Comparing the two and talking about vigilantism is an indication that Keilar has no idea about the facts in this case.  But what is the big offense that Kyle Rittenhouse committed in the left's mind besides shooting people?  It's that he dared to help people defend their property.

The Definitive Debunking of the Gun Control Movement's Lies.  Last month, columnist David Frum penned a piece for The Atlantic that revealed he knows as much about firearms as Michael Moore does about dieting.  In his article, "Responsible Gun Ownership Is a Lie," he argues that Americans are better off with strict gun control designed to make it more difficult for people to own firearms.  Frum makes most of the usual anti-Second Amendment arguments in his piece, deceptively claiming that lax gun control laws make people less safe.  But, as with most of his anti-gun comrades, Frum fails to make a compelling case.  One can understand why Frum is concerned.  Indeed, Americans are buying guns at a rate that would be upsetting to anyone who doesn't want people to own firearms.  A recent survey revealed there were almost 9.8 million background checks for gun sales by June of 2021.  It also found that 33.2 percent were purchased by first-time gun owners.

The Latest Mass Shooting In Minnesota That No One Heard About.  On Saturday, October 9th, a bar in the capital city of Saint Paul was the scene of chaos, fear, and death.  Two gunmen began exchanging gunfire, leaving one innocent female patron dead and over a dozen wounded.  It has received scant coverage in Saint Paul and none outside of the metro area.  I doubt most Minnesotans are aware, let alone others in this country.  It brings me no joy to note that both shooters were black and the deceased was black.  Of course, it fully explains why the propagandist American media is disinterested in the story.

Keywords:  Snowflake, wuss, timid.
A Reporter Shoots an AR-15 and Absolute Hilarity Ensues.  If there's one thing Democrats have taught us about AR-15s, it's that they are the most powerful, deadly weapons of war ever created, assembled by the devil himself.  Of course, anyone that knows anything about the platform and the round it shoots knows that's nonsense, but still, when someone of a leftward persuasion shoots one, hilarity often ensues.  That's what was on tap when Kevin McCallum, writing for Seven Days in Vermont, decided to share his experience shooting an AR-15 at an indoor gun range.  To hear him tell it, he basically had an out-of-body experience due to the massive, bone-rattling recoil.

Triggered: Political Journo Says Shooting AR-15 For The First Time 'Felt Like A Meteor'.  A political journalist in Vermont unironically penned a column this week explaining how his experience shooting an AR-15 in an indoor range for the first time "rattled" him.  "It is difficult to describe the impact — physical and personal — of that first shot.  It felt like a meteor had struck the earth in front of me," Kevin McCallum, a political reporter for Seven Days, wrote unashamedly.  The journo started off by admitting he's not "a gun guy" and hasn't shot anything other than a .22 rifle at a camp more than three decades ago.  McCallum said he hasn't "felt the impulse to own a gun for personal protection, whether due to privilege or delusion or both" and concluded shortly after that keeping a gun in his house would make him and his family "less safe, not more."

Gun-Death Hoax Faked the Facts, Which the Media Echoed.  I recently drove 950 miles to give the keynote commencement address at an online high school based in Las Vegas.  Two thousand students were supposedly going to attend, but it turned out that the school didn't exist.  The fake high school and the deceptive editing of my speech weren't the only falsehoods here.  A gun control organization called "Change the Ref" hoodwinked news outlets worldwide to propagate a lie about how extensive gun violence is in the United States.  The videos made from this address focus on the "lost class."  Specifically, "they are the 3,044 graduating high school seniors that died from gun violence," according to Change the Ref.  These dead students were represented by the vast sea of 3,044 empty chairs that the group had me give my "dress rehearsal" talk in front of.  It is a claim that received unquestioning national (e.g., USA Today, MSNBC, CNN, Washington Post) and international (e.g., The Guardian [UK], Stern [Germany], SBS News [Australia]) news coverage parroting this figure, even running the number in their headlines.  But it is a number that isn't even remotely close to the truth.

Media Malpractice in 2021.  The media's lies extend beyond the hardware and include the nature of gun owners themselves.  Yes, the media lies to us about who owns guns in the United States.  I think I know why.  The media stereotyped gun owners for years.  They call us old-white-rednecks, yet most new gun owners are women and minorities.  For obvious political reasons, the media doesn't want us to know what today's gun owners look like.  Times change, and the media doesn't want minority women to know that they are the fastest growing segment of the gun owning population.  In 2020 and 2021, more minority women are curious about guns as they see their friends become gun owners and take training.  That is called a preference cascade.  The media lies to us so we won't know what is possible for us.

Media has No Standards for Phrase "Surge in Gun Violence" but Loves using it Anyway.  Whenever mainstream outlets use the phrase "surge in gun violence" or "surge of gun violence" you can be relatively assured that they are arguing via left-wing meme rather than any useful statistic.  Most importantly, when someone hears 'gun violence' they are likely thinking criminal use of a gun, when that phrase is deliberately vague so as to overinclude many gun uses that most readers would not intend, such as suicides, defensive gun uses, and accidental discharges.  But this phrase, 'surge in gun violence' is so commonplace that it appears in many mainstream outlets, even when they provide no evidence for the statistical rise in violence, no theory as to why it is rising, and no causal allegation of any kind.

Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots?  I'm seeing this headline on the front page of the NYT website:  "Pandemic Fuels Surge in U.S. Gun Sales 'Unlike Anything We've Ever Seen.'"  Clicking through, I see the headline "An Arms Race in America:  Gun Buying Spiked During the Pandemic.  It's Still Up.  Preliminary research data show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners."  It's absurd to state — as if it's a fact — that the pandemic "fueled" the surge when there were riots and the police stood down and did not protect the citizens!  I personally got trained to use a gun last summer, and I fired a gun for the first time in my life.  That had nothing to do with the pandemic.  It was about civil disorder threatening my neighborhood and the manifest unwillingness of the city to keep order.  You're on your own, we were told, quite plainly.

A Great New Idea for Reducing Police Shootings.  [Scroll down]  As with the left-media cartel's preferred and disdained targets, it is much the same when it comes to shooters who generate their interest.  A Bernie Sanders supporter shot Rep. Steve Scalise at a baseball practice session.  Not interesting, so just one story.  Gabby Giffords was shot by her own Democrat supporter.  Not interesting.  A nut with orange hair shot up a movie theater showing Batman.  Not interesting.  An Arab Muslim shot up a military site.  Workplace violence.  The active Colorado supermarket shooter a few weeks ago generated a storm of interest.  Then the media found out that the arrested guy is named Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa.  End of that coverage.

The Sound Behind You Is Reality Catching Up (and It's Carrying a Gun).  What value is there in a newspaper that ignores or subverts the truth in the service of some fashionable agenda? [...] It should be obvious to anyone not ideologically blinkered that the Los Angeles Times has wed itself to the social justice cause, so inextricably so that no one at the paper seems cognizant of the fact that social justice, with its appeals for compassion for criminals, comes at the expense of actual justice and the welfare of crime victims.  The Los Angeles Times is hardly alone in its descent into woke activism.  Indeed, the entire mainstream media complex seems to have abandoned its pretense of objectivity (and it has long been just a pretense) in favor of open left-wing activism.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the reporting on issues relating to crime.

TV Shows Push Gun Control Myths in Sync With Biden.  Last week, the Biden administration promised gun control groups that it will soon roll out a massive push for limits on firearm purchases and other measures.  President Biden reiterated that promise on Sunday.  And the television networks aren't waiting to lay the groundwork for this effort.  CBS is in a full-court press for gun control on its evening entertainment television shows.  The bad guys are always white supremacists who use machine guns — supposedly AR-15s — to commit mass public shootings.  Criminals in Mexico supposedly get machine guns from the United States.  A father's desire to protect his family only leads to tragedy when his daughter gets into the gun safe and uses the weapon in a mass public shooting.  And guns in the home pose a danger for children.  Gun registration is necessary for solving crime.

Lefty media and pols have fallen into a Kyle Rittenhouse trap.  Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse already is turning into a nightmare for the progressives who immediately demonized him.  The seventeen-year-old boy who traveled to Kenosha with his semi-automatic rifle to defend property from mob destruction appeared at first to be a perfect example of what novelist Tom Wolfe called "The Great White Defendant" in his satirical novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities.  Kyle's white (strike one), he carried a semi-automatic "assault rifle" (strike two), he loves the police (strike three), and even worse, he shot three people demonstrating against allegedly racist cops (by burning and looting businesses of people innocent of anything other than owning a business).  Those committed to the narrative cops hunting down innocent blacks, aka "systemic racism," knew in their bones that he had to be a "white supremacist," and said so right away.

Don't Let the Fake Fact Checkers Fool You — Joe and Kamala Support Gun Confiscation.  Just like Joe Biden, vice presidential hopeful Kamala Harris supports outright, mandatory gun confiscation.  She just disguises it under a couple of flowery words: "mandatory" and "buyback."  This of course is when all of the fake media's fake fact checkers pour out of the woodwork to lie with the false claim Kamala Harris Never Said She Wanted to Confiscate Guns.  We know the fake fact checkers are going to publish their fake fact checks with their fake claims because that's what the fake fact checkers did to protect their precious Barry Obama, who also said he wanted to confiscate your guns.  Further, the fake fact checkers published lies to protect Hillary Clinton, who also said she wanted to confiscate your guns.  Oh, and Joe Biden said he wanted to confiscate your gun, and he also used flowery words about "buybacks," and as you will see below, he has not taken that sentiment back, even after the fake media tried to help him cover up that fact.

CNN's Chris Cuomo Makes an Utter Fool of Himself Interviewing St. Louis Homeowner, Gets Corrected Multiple Times.  As we've previously documented, CNN's supposedly objective "Prime Time" anchor Chris Cuomo has proven himself to be an outright embarrassment to his profession, frequently coming into interviews unprepared and always with a predetermined angle to exploit.  In addition to that, Cuomo has also shown himself to be a generally awful person and hypocrite, unwilling to hold himself (and Democrats) to the same standards he holds everyone else to.  Cuomo proved his critics right once again in every way Tuesday night [6/30/2020] in the "interview" he conducted with St. Louis, Missouri homeowner Mark McCloskey, 63, and his attorney Albert Watkins.

CNN Lies About "Permitless Carry" In Kansas City Shooting.  While I no longer expect the mainstream media to not be biased in their reporting, I do expect them to be factual.  They can be plenty biased in their reporting without mangling the actual facts available, after all.  However, CNN — an outfit that still likes to bill themselves as both trusted and trustworthy — has a habit of not necessarily doing that.  They routinely get labeled "fake news" by people like President Trump and it infuriates them.  The thing is, though, if they don't want to be labeled fake news, they probably should stop doing stupid stuff like this.

CNN Blames Bar Shooting on Lax Gun Laws.  It Got The Facts Wrong.  A CNN article on a recent Kansas City bar shooting mischaracterized the shooter's criminal history to blame the killing on Missouri's gun laws.  Police identified 29-year-old Jahron Swift as the shooter who killed one woman and injured 15 before he was killed by an armed guard January 19.  CNN published a report Wednesday saying Swift likely would have gone to prison over a weapons charge if not for the state's 2017 permitless carry law.  However, the report obfuscated the date of Swift's charge to suggest the law let him off the hook for it.  All of Swift's prior arrests and weapons charges came before Missouri's gun law went into effect.  Even after it was enacted on Jan. 1, 2017, the permitless carry law would not have nullified Swift's pending unlawful use of weapons charges.  But regardless of the permitless carry law, Swift was convicted of two felonies and therefore could not have legally carried a gun.

How Not to Cover a Second Amendment Rally.  Just like the Tea Party's devotion to limited government in 2009, the Second Amendment movement's reverence for guns and gun culture is hard for the uninitiated to understand — and easy for its enemies to willfully misrepresent.  Consider how MSNBC's Craig Melvin characterized the event as his network's cameras trained in on the Virginia State Capitol before the march began.  "This is the scene in Richmond," he said.  "They put white nationalists, militia groups, and supporters of background checks for gun purchases all in one place.  A lot of folks — and justifiably so — are worrying about a repeat of Charlottesville in 2017."

Virginia Second Amendment rally proves the media hate gun owners.  The media elite hate guns, favor gun control, and bear disdain or at least distrust for those who are passionate about gun rights.  Reporters' coverage of and reaction to Monday's [1/20/2020] Second Amendment demonstration makes that abundantly clear.  For starters, NBC News reporter Ben Collins, again, he's a reporter, not an opinion writer, flatly and falsely called the demonstration a "white nationalist rally" in a tweet calling on everyone covering it to "verify information" before tweeting it out.  Collins has deleted the smear-tweet, but you have to consider the nature of the error.  While deeply thinking about accuracy in tweets, a news reporter falsely called a gun rights rally a "white nationalist rally."

The Best 'White Supremacist' Minority Protests From the Virginia Gun Rally You Won't See on the News.  All day Monday the media tried to whip up fear and loathing by calling peaceful Americans of all colors and creeds "white supremacists," "white nationalists," "hate groups," and "militia groups," warning they would cause "violence" at the rally for Second Amendment rights in Virginia on Monday.  Here's an absolutely mind-numbing montage of the kind of fake news pumped into every American living room today.  Literally none of it happened.  Not only was no one arrested, but they carried out their trash too.

Columnist: 'Terrifying' That Parishioners Were Armed in TX Church.  A columnist writing at AZCentral.com suggests it was "terrifying" that parishioners were armed at the church in White Settlement, Texas. [...] She did not explain what was terrifying about parishioners being armed nor did she point out their self-control or the responsible conduct they demonstrated while their firearms were drawn.  Rather, [Elivia] Diaz wrote, "Have we really reached a point when each of us need to carry a firearm anywhere we go?  Gun advocates certainly think so.  They point to Wilson and the new Texas law that allows him and others to carry firearms inside the church."

The Editor says...
If you visit a church in Texas, and you don't like guns, keep your eyes closed.

Questions Remain As To How Pensacola Guman Got [a] Firearm.  Last week was a rough one for the Navy.  While gearing up to commemorate the bombing of Pearl Harbor, we had a shooting there in Hawaii.  That was then followed up with a shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola.  The Pensacola attack was more deadly, claiming the lives of three servicemen there on the base.  Now, questions have arisen as to how the gunman, a Saudi national there at the base for training purposes, got his hands on a firearm in the first place. [...] In other words, while they're decrying loopholes, we still don't even know how he got his firearm.  Did he buy it from a lawful dealer with false identification?  Did the dealer sell it to him illegally?  Did he buy it via a face-to-face transfer and tell the other party he was an American citizen?  We simply don't know much of anything.  So why do we get these stories?  Well, that's because the purpose of these stories isn't really to inform you of anything.

Shootings The MSM Doesn't Care About.  Jazz Shaw at Hotair.com (which was founded by Michelle Malkin) writes about two shootings that don't fit the Narrative.  One is the Hmong shooting in Fresno, where, of course, Hmong violence is a regular thing, and has been for years. [...] 10 people were shot, and four of them died, so far.  The other is one I don't remember hearing of:  the Bunny Friend Park shooting in New Orleans, in 2015.  Sixteen people were shot... and no one died, although at least one was permanently crippled.

Why you're not hearing more about that mass shooting in Fresno.  This shooting qualified for multiple Breaking News announcements on cable news and announcements arriving in people's email inboxes.  And then a strange thing seemed to happen.  By Monday morning there was almost no additional coverage.  I think I saw it mentioned briefly twice on CNN, and then it was back to the impeachment hearings pretty much non-stop.  With ten people shot and four killed, this obviously meets the media's current definition of a mass shooting.  So where was the outrage?  Where were the calls for new gun control laws?  How did this tragedy turn into a non-story?  First of all, the victims were all adult males from the Hmong community.  And while police said they didn't find any ties to gang activity among the victims, they were looking into a recent "disturbance" between some of them and members of one of the local Hmong gangs.  (Fresno has had problems with gang violence, including Hmong groups, for quite a while now.)

How the American Media Perpetuates and Profits from Mass Shootings.  The American media currently has no industry standard practices for how to cover either suicides or mass shootings.  However, one can easily see the difference between how mass shootings and suicides are covered.  Whereas suicides are treated as sombre tragedies, mass shootings often have the sensationalism turned up to 11.  There's a detailed discussion of the shooter's life story, motives and methods.  Strong evidence suggests that this both encourages and instructs potential mass shooters.  Statistically speaking, mass shootings represent a tiny portion of all deaths in the United States. [...] Despite the low frequency of these tragedies, the media pays outsized attention to them for self-serving reasons, which are both political and economic:  There's a demonstrated anti-gun agenda amongst America's media.  And there's the ongoing shift in the media's business model to attention-based revenue that results in ever-more sensational news coverage and "clickbait" headlines.

No Shots Fired — The Missing Statistic in Defensive Gun Use.  When was the last time you heard on the news about someone using a gun to save their life, the life of others, or property... without firing a shot?  Exactly.  And that's a problem.

Jerome Hudson Calls Out the Left's Climate Hypocrisy, Gun Control Hysteria.  Breitbart News Entertainment Editor Jerome Hudson joins Fox News host Jesse Watters and reveals the most explosive facts found in his new book from Harper Collins, 50 Things They Don't Want You to Know.  "From 1950 to 2018, we're talking about almost 70 years, we now know that 97 percent of mass shootings have occurred in 'gun-free-zones,'" Jerome Hudson said.  "This is an indictment on the media, Jesse," Hudson said about the establishment media blackout on drug overdose deaths compared to their coverage of mass shootings.

How to Bend the News.  This, from ABC, is a nice example of a news organization deliberately bending the truth in order to advance a narrative that it wishes were true but is not:  ["]Venerable gun manufacturer Colt says it will stop producing the AR-15, among other rifles, for the consumer market in the wake of many recent mass shootings in which suspects used the weapon.["]  Wow.  Sounds dramatic. [...] So the story is that, although it still respects the Second Amendment, Colt is going to stop producing AR-15s after a series of mass shootings in which they were used.  Right?  Wrong.  That's actually not the story at all, as ABC notes further down:  ["]The company did not mention mass shootings in its statement about stopping production and instead blamed the indefinite pause in making the weapon on a 'significant excess manufacturing capacity.'["]

Dana Loesch Explains How Media Manipulates Polling On Firearms.  Gun expert Dana Loesch dissected a new ABC News/Washington Post poll on gun control on Monday [9/9/2019] and explained why polling on the issue is oftentimes misleading. [...] Loesch began by highlighting problems with the following question that was asked:  "Would you support or oppose a nationwide ban on high-capacity ammunition clips, meaning those containing more than 10 bullets?"  "This is one question," Loesch tweeted.  "First of all, the terminology is incorrect (this matters for a couple reasons) and who determined over 10 rounds means 'high-capacity?'  In some, that isn't even standard, it's below standard."

MSNBC 'Republican' Urges People To Target NRA Board Members: 'Go After Their Businesses'.  Isn't it funny how even the supposed conservatives on many liberal networks embrace the progressive view on multiple issues?  Over at MSNBC, supposed Republican Susan Del Percio, recently urged people to target board members of the NRA and even target their businesses.

If You're Trying To Ban Guns, The Least You Can Do Is Learn The Basics.  Can anyone imagine a major newspaper running an op-ed justifying public ignorance on public policy?  Actually, not merely justifying the ignorance, but rather arguing that facts only help smother discourse rather than enhance it.  It's improbable.  Then again, this is the gun debate.  And one side benefits from policy illiteracy.  The Washington Post ran an op-ed by former Gawker writer Adam Weinstein arguing that Second Amendment advocates use "jargon" to bully gun-control supporters.  "While debating the merits of various gun control proposals," he contends, "Second Amendment enthusiasts often diminish, or outright dismiss their views if they use imprecise firearms terminology."

Is It True That 'Getting Killed by Police Is a Leading Cause of Death for Young Black Men,' as the LA Times Claims?  As is the intent, the headline is an attention-grabber. [...] Most readers of course will not delve beyond the headline, but even those who do will not encounter anything resembling journalism as it was once practiced.  Rather, they'll find more than 1,400 words devoted to the racial-grievance agenda that drives so much of what appears in the Los Angeles Times.  And worse, not only is journalism itself perverted with the story, but so is science, for the story is presented as such on the page and was written by Amina Khan, who is billed on the paper's website as a "science writer."  So, if you dare to quibble with any of the story's details, or heaven forbid question its very premise, it makes you a "denier," one to be cast out into the darkness with climate-change skeptics, believers in sex differences, and all the other benighted deplorables who are so sneered upon among our sophisticated betters in the media.

Government, Media, and Gun Control.  People are far more likely to turn on gun owners if the tragedy is in their own backyard, a Walmart, a concert, or a club.  These are places most Americans go at one time or another so the message is no one's safe.  The media then binge-reports on the tragedy, paints it as a national crisis, a recurring event, an ever-present danger that demands new gun laws.  Thus these domestic terror attacks are tailor-made to achieve gun control.  But the left and their media can't wait around for a crisis so they augment their gun control argument with a blatant lie.  They repeatedly claim that the US has the most mass shootings, that these events only happen in America.  But that narrative is false.

The Media Should Stop Encouraging Mass-Shooting Phobias.  Suppose an otherwise bright and promising young person told you she was terrified of food.  She was having difficulty sleeping at night.  Every meal time was a source of anguish.  She couldn't stop thinking about choking to death on food.  Fear of choking to death was interfering with her relationships, making it difficult for her to do her job, warping her life.  You would advise such a person to seek counseling, or counsel her yourself.  You would tell her to look at the numbers.  You would point out that it's highly unlikely she will die of choking on food.  What you would not do is encourage her to be afraid of food, publicize her views, put her on talk shows and magazine covers, or make her a national spokesperson on the dangers of choking on food.  And yet that is exactly what the media, from the New York Times on down, do when it comes to mass shootings.

CNN's gun violence town hall is a train wreck — again.  CNN hosted a town hall on gun violence Thursday [8/8/2019] in response to two horrific mass shootings Saturday, one in El Paso and the other in Dayton.  It was titled "America Under Assault:  The Gun Crisis."  It was the cable news giant's second such event on the subject.  The first was in response to last year's shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school.  Instead of the solution-finding discussion it was advertised to be, it was a political hit job.

The Killers In El Paso And Dayton Targeted Unarmed Citizens — But The Media Won't Admit It.  The media has ignored the fact that killers targeted unarmed citizens — including in El Paso, Texas and in Dayton, Ohio. [...] So what we see are politicians making false claims out of ignorance.  For example:
  •   Cory Booker claimed that mass shootings are a "uniquely American problem."  But this is false.  The United States is not even in the top 50 countries when one compares mass shootings per capita among nations.
  •   Countless Democratic presidential hopefuls are bashing firearms like AR-15s, claiming that Americans have no use for owning such weapons.  Again, this is grossly false.  Several men and women have used these guns in self-defense, including a Houston man who used his AK-47 to fend off five home invaders this year.
  •   Even the president weighed in on Monday, arguing that Congress should encourage states to pass "red flag" Gun Confiscation Orders.  But these gun grabs allow for the confiscation of firearms from innocent Americans — which often turn out badly, as seen by the police killing of an African-American Maryland man last year.

Vox Confirms That, Yes, They Do Want to Take Our Guns.  The brutal news about the mass shootings over the weekend has once again left social media and the blogosphere flooded with thousands of ignorant hot takes offering solutions that won't solve anything.  Predictably, the Democrats running for president have been some of the worst offenders.  As expected, they're all full of cries for congressional action, however vague.  The tragedies have highlighted just how little difference there is between them. [...] The progressive brain trust over at Vox.com posted a rather long article that was one of the more honest leftist anti-gun pieces I've read in a while and illustrates precisely why law-abiding gun owners are so distrustful of the anti-Second Amendment crowd.

CNN Is Really Upset That Scot Peterson Got Arrested Over His Cowardice.  You can always count on CNN to be on the wrong side of every issue and their response to Scot Peterson being arrested for his cowardice (among other things) during the Parkland shooting is no exception.  While there are questions about whether Peterson has legal liability, there's no doubt he was a primary factor in so many children being killed that day.  He sat idly by as a gunman walked around the school shooting people when it was his job to respond with force.  To give you an idea of CNN's bias on this issue, Chris Cillizza once notably quipped on Twitter that a "good guy with a gun doesn't always stop a bad guy."  This echoed CNN's softball treatment of Sheriff Scott Israel at a town hall where they instead savaged Dana Loesch, who had nothing to do with the shooting.

CNN Goes Melodramatic To Push Gun Control Agenda After Colorado Shooting.  CNN took to not only politicizing the recent school shooting in Colorado but doing so with a melodramatic new gimmick.  Brooke Baldwin simply emoted into the camera as images flashed behind her on a screen.  First, you see Baldwin at her desk at CNN.  Then, you see the inside of a classroom where students are discussing the incident.  "I'm afraid that one day I'll go to school and I'll never come out," one grieving student sobs.  "What actions will you take to protect people like me and my classmates from this happening?"  Then we see Baldwin again, hands folded in her lap, glaring angrily at the camera.

MSNBC Accidentally Makes Strong Case For Second Amendment While Discussing Venezuela.  MSNBC reporter Kerry Sanders accidentally made a strong case for the Second Amendment on Tuesday [4/30/2019] during a segment on the far-left network about the chaos in Venezuela.  The segment came after opposition leader Juan Guaido called on Venezuelan citizens and members of the armed forces to join a movement to overthrow brutal socialist dictator Nicolas Maduro.  Sanders noted that Maduro still maintained control of the military through the whole ordeal, adding:  "You have to understand, in Venezuela gun ownership is not something that's open to everybody.  So if the military have the guns, they have the power and as long as Nicolás Maduro controls the military, he controls the country."

Column Proves Some Folks Are Anti-Gun Because They're Idiots.  Now, some I understand.  They're emotional over it.  Maybe they lost someone.  Either way, they're not able to think clearly on the topic of guns, so emotion drives them.  However, after reading this column this morning, I also had to remember that apparently, some are anti-gun because they're just stupid.

Columnist Upset That Gun Rights Actually Matter To Some People.  Based purely on the name, the Violence Against Women Act sounds like a slam dunk as far as legislation goes.  After all, who would actively oppose a law designed to protect women from violence?  Ordinarily, no one.  However, Democrats felt the need to inject anti-gun language into the bill.  Now, Republicans are working against it, and some supposed "thinkers" are upset at the idea.

CNN Wins Cronkite Award For That Garbage Gun-Control Town Hall It Held After Parkland.  Literally one of the most demagogic stunts CNN has ever aired, but it had the right politics so naturally it just won a Cronkite Award for "journalism" from USC's Norman Lear Center.  The full title of the award, by the way, is "The Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism."  The official title of the CNN town hall was "Stand Up:  The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action."  It wasn't journalism and wasn't even presented as such.  It was gun-control advocacy by its own terms.

CA Newspaper:  Our State's Gun Control Laws Are In Jeopardy.  The last time the Supreme Court heard a gun-related case was back in 2008 when they ruled "the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home" in the landmark Heller decision.  What's interesting is the San Francisco Chronicle, a rather liberal newspaper in California, published an editorial admitting that the state's gun control laws may be in danger.  While the Supreme Court was reluctant to hear Second Amendment-related cases, the Court now has more conservative justices.  Now that Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh are on the Court, gun rights activists are expecting landslide victories that can and will protect the right to keep and bear arms for years to come.

How The Left Manipulates Facts To Advance The Narrative.  Anti-gunners love to distort facts.  In fairness, they're far from the only ones who do it, but anti-gun leftists are especially fond of this tactic.  Personally, I think they're so good at it that they do it on a subconscious level, never realizing they're knee-deep in a delusion.  A prime example comes from Forward.  It seems that Nikki Fried's win as Agriculture Secretary in Florida is proof of pro-gun control swing.

Here are the Most Egregious Fake News Stories of 2018.  [#8] CNN spreads false statistic on school shooting:  After a May school shooting in Texas, CNN anchor Jim Sciutto and political correspondent Sara Murray both claimed that there had already been 22 school shootings in 2018.  CNN's list of "school shootings" includes accidental firearm discharges, events that don't involve any students, and domestic disputes — hardly the incidents that most people consider to be a school shooting.

New York Times Wants To Have Credit Card Companies Monitor Sales Of Guns And Ammo.  The New York Times ran an article today [12/24/2018] that opens a new front in the progressive dream of restricting and eventually banning gun ownership.

New York Times Pressures Credit Card Giants to Blacklist Gun Purchasers.  The New York Times is pressuring credit card giants to monitor customers' buying habits and blacklist gun purchases.  The Times suggests banks are "unwittingly financing mass shootings" by allowing individuals to use their cards to buy firearms and related accessories.

Shooting of Criminal by Citizen NOT Reported by Police & NOT Unusual.  On 7 December 2018, at about 7:45 p.m., the owner of the Alibaba's convenience store in Syracuse, New York shot and wounded an armed robber.  The robber ended up in the hospital.  The story made the news.  A local reporter for syracuse.com, Patrick Lohmann, investigated the story and wrote it up.  While doing a followup, Lohmann discovered the store owner had shot another robbery suspect six weeks earlier.  That story did not make the news.

Newsweek Reporter:  Almost Everyone I've Ever Heard Of Who Owns An AR-15 Is A Mass Murderer.  What she said is a smear (a highly paranoid one too, ironically) but in her case it's probably the truth.  She's a professional journalist who lives in New York City.  She writes on feminism, Washington politics, and the Middle East.  How many people could she possibly know who own an AR-15? The only time she's apt to run across one is on the printed newspaper page, in stories about lunatics living out their revenge fantasies by reaching for something powerful that resembles an M-16.

Shooting holes in agenda journalism.  Lots of folks like to throw around the term "fake news" to describe stories they do not like or stories that are, well, fake.  I prefer the term "agenda journalism" because it does not make a judgment on the veracity of the reporting, and it can be easier to spot than the fake stuff that always has an agenda.  The Huffington Post ran such a piece last week called "Gun owners more likely to vote than non-gun owners."  Do not accuse me of journalism profiling, because I believe even the editors of the HuffPost would eagerly agree they have a decidedly leftward tilt in their views of events.  So, yeah, the agenda was pretty clear, as was my need to lean way over to starboard while reading to keep from falling out of my chair.  Here are some interesting nuggets that show the story and the results of the University of Kansas study that prompted it to be left-wing, anti-gun propaganda with no news or educational value.

The 3D-Gun Debate:  Separating Truth from Fiction.  One of the most bizarre aspects of the modern gun debate is the extent to which it is still dominated by ignorance and misinformation.  One of the most important controversies in American public life rages on, yet media gatekeepers and all too many politicians simply don't know the most basic facts.  They don't understand the most basic constitutional issues.  Even worse, many of them don't seem to care.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#48] Guns Are Evil:  A typical line of bias against guns employed by the media is that of "expert" testimony.  An example might be the 2009 story ABC put out that aired the opinions of a rabid anti-gun group, but did not tell the viewers that those being presented as "experts" had a political agenda.  Another thing the media does is use scary words that have little meaning to bias viewers and readers against gns.  To the media, any gun used in a crime is an "assault weapon," even though there really is no legitimate definition of such a class of weapons.  Another example might be the story of the Chicago gun buy-back program that the media touted as a good program even though gun related crimes were still soaring in the city.  Instead of talking about why crime was occurring in the city the media focused on the guns as if guns got up and did the shooting all by themselves.

Hollywood Hypocrisy On Guns.  TV shows are still pushing gun violence to goose the ratings.  A recent study by the Parents Television Council reported that the degree of gun violence on prime-time broadcast TV has actually increased in the last five years since the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.  In a review of the November 2017 sweeps period after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, it found that 175 of 287 episodes contained violence (almost 61 percent) and 112 of them (39 percent) had scenes of gun violence.  It's dramatically worse at the movies.  Matt Philbin of the Media Research Center reported last fall that an astounding 589 incidents of violence were featured in "Kingsman:  The Golden Circle," "American Assassin," Stephen King's "It" and "mother!" And that's just four top-grossing movies from the week before the Las Vegas attack.  The films had no less than 212 incidents of gun violence, and the body count was at least 192.

How Entertainment Shows Have Become Vehicles for Gun Control Propaganda.  All of the major television networks use their primetime entertainment shows to push a pro-gun control agenda.  Liberal television executives apparently think that they have the power to change Americans' attitudes.  Not liking guns has been portrayed as cool for a long time.  It is an old theme that dates back to the original 1980s MacGyver series, in which the titular character avoids using guns and expresses his aversion to them.  This theme has continued with the current remake.  But the push to sway public opinion really seems to have picked up.

Media Silent As US Agrees To 'Full Implementation' of United Nations Gun Control Pact.  While the United States is typically set apart from other countries when it comes to gun laws, a recent conference with the United Nations has raised major red flags, as the U.S. agreed to enact "full implementation" of an international agreement on gun control that will violate Americans' constitutional rights by adding their personal information to a global database.  The Third Review Conference (RevCon) of the United Nations' Program of Action (PoA) on Small Arms and Light Weapons was held in New York last week with a 2018 agreement, which states that its purpose is to serve as "a renewed commitment to prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons in all its aspects."

Op-Ed Claims Every Gun Is An Assault Weapon.  Anti-gunners have a nasty tendency to grab hold of whatever they can to try and take away people's rights.  Following Parkland, the focus was on modern sporting rifles.  It wasn't the first time, either, of course.  It was just what happens after a shooting.  Following the Santa Fe High School shooter and the Capital Gazette shooter both using shotguns, though, it seems that anti-gunners are trying to use that to open the door on broader restrictions.

A Georgia Man's NYC Arrest And The Media's Love Of The Word 'Arsenal'.  A Georgia man was recently arrested in New York City.  His crime?  Having a firearm.  Apparently, that was all.  Well, he had more than one firearm.  Frankly, I don't have any sympathy for the man, either.  After all, we all know that NYC is a no-go zone for legal guns.

UK Police Shut Down Popular Gun Channel on YouTube, Branding it a 'Forum of Extremism'.  On Sunday [6/10/2018], YouTuber Callum Long-Collins announced he would be effectively shutting down the channel EnglishShooting, a YouTube channel that racked up more than 15,000 subscribers and more than 12 million views in the past four years.  Long-Collins said the police had marked his YouTube channel as a "forum of extremism," and that he had to "show the police that I am a fit character to own firearms within the U.K."  "I was told that due to repeated comments from other people on the videos [police] felt that the channel was a forum of extremism and it was promoting views that were not in line with legal firearms ownership within the U.K.," Long-Collins said in a YouTube video announcing "The End of EnglishShooting."

NBC's Pete Williams Struggles To Describe How Shotguns Work.  NBC correspondent Pete Williams employed an interesting analogy on Friday when trying to describe how shotguns work.  According to Williams, describing the gun used by the shooter in the Capital Gazette newsroom on Thursday, insisted that shotguns operate like a "backwards funnel."  "A shotgun, uh, uh, you know, if you're not familiar with a shotgun, it sets out a spray of pellets and because a bullet simply goes in a straight line and shotgun is sort of like a backwards funnel, it spreads it out so that you don't have to aim very precisely," Williams claimed on MSNBC on Friday [6/29/2018].

The Editor says...
It sounds like the only shotgun he's ever seen was in the hands of Elmer Fudd.

Here's The NRA Video Calling For 'Common Sense Media Control'.  NRA TV host Colion Noir produced a new video calling for "common sense media control" that is causing a stir. [...] Noir begins by underscoring the role fame plays in inspiring mass shootings.  "Can anyone tell me the last time a mass school shooter left a manifesto, a comment on social media, or a video where they said they were inspired to commit their atrocity because of a firearm?" he asks. [...] "They're inspired by the infamous glory of past shooters, who they relate to.  And no entity on the planet does a better job, whether directly or indirectly, of glorifying these killers and thereby providing the inspiration for the next one."

Ted Cruz Says Media Is Avoiding Santa Fe School Shooting Because Texas Students Don't Want Gun Control.  [Quoting Ted Cruz] Out of a dozen students who just hours earlier had been in this shooting, every one of them said the answer is not gun control.  They said, don't take our guns.  They said if you take our guns, it won't make us safer, it will just mean the killers and murderers have guns.  A lot of the students there said, "Well, maybe more metal detectors in schools.  Maybe more armed police officers in schools, so that you're able to stop something like this when it happens."  Several of the students brought up that they thought teachers should be able to be armed.

In the span of one week, the American media showed us exactly whose side it's on.  Friday brought the atrocity of the school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.  Ten people were murdered.  Throughout the day, unconfirmed rumors about the shooting were picked up by an all-too-eager national media.  The local media in Houston stepped up to distinguish fact from rumor.  As part of KHOU's admirable reporting, the station debunked a false narrative spread by CNN that misleadingly exaggerated the number of school shootings this year by lumping in shooting incidents like the attack in Santa Fe with a BB gun hitting a school bus, suicides, and gang violence.  The local journalists, in other words, acted as journalists — reviewing the facts, dispelling rumors, and seeking to report the truth.  CNN misled Americans to score political points.

What's Wrong With Those Texans?  That's the question the Associated Press asks, following the school shootings in Santa Fe:  "School shooting may not bring change to gun-loving Texas." [...] What's interesting is that the AP never hints at what "gun restrictions" the State of Texas ought to adopt.  Indeed, it becomes obvious that the AP reporter, speaking for liberals and the mainstream of the Democratic Party, doesn't much care:  any restrictions will do.

The Left Has Created A Cottage Industry From the Deaths of Children.  More details about the incident are sure to be made public in the coming hours and days, but we'll take a wild guess here:  White, male student, considered a loner, possibly already on the radar of local law enforcement, and almost certainly under the influence of prescription drugs in the SSRI class.  Why do I feel so confident about making this assumption?  Simply because this has been the M.O. of nearly every mass shooter in American history since the advent of antidepressants, (which is pretty much every mass shooter in American history).  One of the few exceptions to this rule was Stephen Paddock of Las Vegas infamy, whose timeline and history have been an oddly well-guarded secret among local law enforcement.

CNN Says There Have Been 22 School Shootings This Year.  That's A Lie.  CNN used the following parameters for their count:
  •   A shooting that involved at least one person being shot (not including the shooter)
  •   A shooting that occurred on school grounds
  •   We included grades K through college/university level
  •   We included gang violence, fights and domestic violence
  •   We included accidental discharge of a firearm as long as the first two parameters are met
So, in other words, not mass shootings; not even purposeful shootings; not even shootings involving children.  If a gang member shot another gang member on school grounds during the summer, this would count as a school shooting.  If a wife shot a husband at a school, they counted it.

Media portrayal of gun ownership is inaccurate and biased.  The media's pro-gun control bias doesn't just distort news coverage.  TV networks have used their primetime entertainment shows to portray gun rights advocates as dishonest, extremist and unconcerned about the loss of innocent lives.  At the same time, advocates of gun control are portrayed as caring, upstanding and responsible citizens.  The gun control debate isn't portrayed as having two sides.  It's a morality play of good versus evil.  NBC might be the worst network, but it's a tight race.

Eric Swalwell Unloads Gun Platform Liberals Really Want.  Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California wants to ban assault weapons, instate a federal gun buy-back program for those who own them and criminally prosecute those who refuse to hand them over.  The representative wrote an op-ed in USA Today Thursday [5/3/2018] rolling out what he feels is the gun control policy America should adopt, one that would take "military-style semiautomatic assault weapons" away from law-abiding citizens and threaten them with jail time if they refuse.

Barack Obama Gives Glowing Praise To David Hogg, Kyle Kashuv Destroys Every Word.  Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg, who was nowhere near where the actual shooting took place, has become as annoying as a canker sore, especially to Kyle Kashuv.  He is one of the students who has received the least attention because he supports the Constitutional right to bear arms. [...] On Thursday [4/19/2018], it was announced that David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, Kyle Kasky and other anti-Second Amendment activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, as a group, were named as one of Time Magazine's most influential people of 2018.  In a shocking twist of irony, their write up in the magazine was penned by none other than former President Barack Obama, the same president who helped run guns to Mexican drug cartels with former Attorney General Eric Holder in Operation Fast & Furious.  Kashuv thought it was ridiculous, and he destroyed it on Twitter.

The Editor says...
It would not surprise me to learn that someone other than Barack H. Obama wrote the article for Time Magazine, since Mr. Obama has apparently taken credit for other writer's work in the past.

Not a joke:  Fortune names David Hogg and cohorts the world's greatest leaders of 2018.  It has a whiff of classic fake news:  David Hogg and all his foul-mouthed little high school buddies who made headlines and raked cash from their calls for gun control in the wake of the Parkland shooting have been elevated to the number-one spot in Fortune magazine's annual list of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders. [...] Fortune's entire list is composed of leftists, as if lefties are desperate to have people to look up to in these long dark days of Trump.  They can call it what they want, but the rest of us see it as a hagiography of the left's favorite leftists.  How far this once distinguished magazine has fallen if it can substitute the Parkland gun-controllers' activism for actual leadership that matters.

How Much Did The Media Cover Pro-Life Student Walkout Vs.  Gun Control Walkout?  Last week, pro-life students across the country walked out of their classrooms in protest of the war on unborn children.  But you wouldn't know it because the media stonewalled them, unlike the pro-gun control students who received wall-to-wall glowing coverage during their anti-gun walkouts.  According to LifeSiteNews, during the protest last Wednesday, the "three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) never once mentioned the pro-life walkout during their news shows on the night of the event."  Compare that to the more than 10 minutes that networks devoted to the pro-gun control National School Walkout Day.  In total, the networks covered the March for Our Lives 13 times more than the pro-life March for Life.

Media Stacking the Deck for Gun Control Following Florida Shooting.  During the two-day White House conference on school safety, Andrew Pollack, the father of a child who was killed during the Florida school massacre last week, summed up the feelings of many:  "How many schools, how many children need to get shot?  I am not going to sleep until it is fixed!"  The question is, what is "it" that needs to be fixed?  Is it the fact that authorities did see that Nikolas Cruz's odd behavior could have led to trouble?  Is it that once those authorities were alerted to a potential problem, they did nothing to intervene or avert the problem from breaking out into violence?  Is it that Cruz was able to purchase a firearm legally even though he had a history of violent behavior?  Is it "bump stocks," which allow semi-automatic rifles to become rapid-fire weapons?  Or is it that no one on the school grounds was able to return fire before Cruz obliterated the lives of 17 students and devastated the lives of many others before being neutralized?  To members of the mainstream media, there is only one solution:  more restrictions on innocent, law-abiding gun owners who had nothing whatever to do with the Florida shooting.

Larry Elder's brilliant expose of Hogg-Ingraham hullabaloo hypocrisy.  It's been several days since Fox News host Laura Ingraham offered an apology to student gun control activist David Hogg for characterizing him as whiney on Twitter.  And it's been a couple of days since Hogg told Ingraham, via national television, sorry, your apology is unacceptable — and now you must denounce your employer or face the continued wrath of calls for advertiser boycott.  Well, the battle lines have been drawn anew.  And now Larry Elder, talk show host and nationally recognized conservative writer, has put out a series of tweets that outright blast back at the hypocrisy of the media, the left and the whole Hogg-driven campaign to silence speech deemed inappropriate — more often than not, the code word for conservative.

Media Bias Evident in Coverage of Great Mills High School Shooting.  Just hours after the shooting at Great Mills High School in Maryland that ended without significant blood being shed by innocents thanks to an armed school resource officer (SRO), Gadsen1805 commented regarding an AP story about the incident:  "Good guy with a gun puts an end to a planned mass shooting ... let's see how much press this gets."  A better question Gadsen1805 might have asked is "How is the mainstream media going to twist this to fit their anti-gun agenda?"

Media Celebrate Companies Severing Ties With NRA.  Following the announcement by a few well-known companies that they were "severing" their relationships with the National Rifle Association (NRA), the New York Times wrote positively of the actions. [...] The Times overstated the impact by calling the decisions a "boycott" of the NRA, [...] What impact the so-called "boycott" of the NRA is likely to have is highly questionable.

House of Canards:  Netflix Drama Gets it Wrong on Gun Laws, NRA.  March 4 saw the premiere of the fourth season of Netflix's hit political drama House of Cards.  The show follows the machinations of House Majority Whip Frank Underwood as he ascends to the presidency and subsequently runs to stay in office.  While the real-life Washington elite certainly have an unsettling fondness for the Machiavellian drama, its depiction of life inside the Beltway is highly stylized.  This season this fact is made abundantly clear with the show's portrayal of federal gun laws and NRA.

The Glades, "Iron Pipeline": it's always the awkward ones.  Guns are bad and only police personnel should own them; that is what the episode teaches.

'Superior Donuts' Questions Gun Ownership In Chicago.  In Chicago, there is a 1 in 33 chance that you could become a victim of a crime.  Sounds to me like owning a gun would almost be a no-brainer to defend yourself.  However, in the Chicago of CBS's Superior Donuts, gun ownership is still treated as a controversial event despite the hundreds of murders that occur yearly in that city.

Does ammunition in a fire pose a real threat to firemen?  Given that many different shows on NBC seem to have an episode attacking gun ownership, it is beginning to appear as if the people at NBC have made a network decision on gun control.

Totally Non-Partisan New York Times Helpfully Offers to Rewrite Second Amendment.  It was about self defense against all enemies foreign and domestic.  It was about protecting yourself, your family, your friends, and your property against tyrannical and/or abusive government.  Sure, you will most likely lose.  That's not the point.  You are given the chance to defend yourself.  And, perhaps your comrades come to your aid.  Perhaps a free press, tasked with holding government accountable, would come to your aid.  And, who would decide "responsible"?  That's the part that kills this whole mess.  Perhaps we could rewrite the 1st to no longer include freedom of the press unless they use quill pens and the same type of printing presses and delivery methods (foot and horses) available at the time the Bill of Rights was passed.  Oh, and I wonder if the NY Times has given up its own armed security.

No One Is Saying That.  Did you hear?  They're talking about repealing the Second Amendment.  It started with former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley.  And it sure does seem like those calls prompted skeptics of American gun culture to echo their remarks.  Turley and Stevens were joined this week by op-ed writers in the pages of Esquire and the Seattle Times.  Democratic candidates for federal office have even enlisted in the ranks of those calling for an amendment to curtail the freedoms in the Bill of Rights.  Of course, this is just the most mainstream invocation of anti-Second Amendment themes that have been expressed unashamedly for years, from liberal activists like Michael Moore to conservative opinion writers at the New York Times. [...] You might be surprised to learn that none of this occurred.  It's only your vivid or, some might go so far as to say, fevered imagination.  Rest assured, CNN host Chris Cuomo insists that "no one" is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment.  And even if they are, as Justice Stevens most certainly is, he's a "boogeyman" who commands no influence or respect.

CNN's Stelter Admits He Let David Hogg Get Away With Lies About Guns, NRA.  It's not often that CNN media reporter Brian Stelter is honest about his blatant biases when it comes to politics, just take his assertions about the President's mental fitness and his denials of making such connections.  But during an appearance on the Monday edition of HLN's S.E. Cupp Unfiltered, the Reliable Sources host appeared to let it slip that he let radical anti-gun activist David Hogg get away with making false claims about the guns and the NRA during a February 25 interview on his show.  Stelter's admission came after host S.E. Cupp questioned him about the wisdom of the media's obsession with elevating only the kids pushing gun control.

Liberal Journos Tell Justice Stevens To Shut-Up About Dinging The Second Amendment.  Left-leaning members of the media who are worried about upcoming elections want retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens to stop suggesting lawmakers repeal the Second Amendment.  The Washington Post and Think Progress writers don't want Stevens' call to amend the U.S. Constitution to rile up gun-owning, blue-collar workers before the November election.

Revealing Scenes From The "March For Our Lives".  Nearly all the coverage of the March for our Lives events today predictably looked like a scene straight out of central casting.  That was particularly true of the coverage on CNN. [...] Yes, despite the fact that a lot of these kids were barely aware of the NRA (if at all) just last semester, everyone was blaming the NRA.  That's easy to do when you don't realize that the NRA is the biggest organization pushing gun safety out there and that nobody from the NRA has ever shot up a school.  Some of the well "prepared" activists were far less subtle when it came to the organization.

Parkland Student Defends NRA After Being Left Out of Time Magazine Cover.  A Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior said Friday he believes he wasn't featured on a recent TIME Magazine cover with fellow activist classmates because he supports the Second Amendment.  Kyle Kashuv won't be attending a "March For Our Lives" rally in the nation's capital this weekend and will instead be meeting with legislators.

YouTube Bans Firearms Channels.  Those who follow firearms, shooting, and tactical channels on YouTube know about the travails of Hickok45 on YouTube.  Venerable and old school, Hickok45 tests and comments on firearms manufacturers send him.  Sometimes he shoots his own firearms, but always, he shoots, comments and often provides history and mechanical commentary on the machines he is using.  Sometimes it is with admiration, sometimes slight disdain, but always honest and interesting.  Hickok45 met with disapproval from some redditors when he supported the NRA in light of the compromises the NRA recommended (e.g., bump stocks, enhanced background checks), but being a former LEO and old school like he is, I wouldn't have expected anything else from him.  Just as interesting to me is Jeff Quinn of Gunblast, especially when shooting and commenting on revolvers, but always interesting.

Ben Shapiro Destroys Stelter for Denying Media's Liberal Bias.  In a bit of must-see TV, conservative icon and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources this Sunday [3/18/2018] to debate host Brian Stelter on the topic of the media's liberal bias.  As expected, Shapiro wiped the floor with Stelter as he called out CNN for blatantly pushing a gun control agenda and not being objective.  After being asked by Stelter to address where he saw the greatest example of liberal media bias, Shapiro zeroed in on their uniform calls for gun control and gun bans.  "Well, over the last three weeks, obviously the coverage of the gun debate has been absolutely egregious," he said.  "And I don't want to single out your network, but CNN has been pretty bad about this, from a conservative perspective."

'It's Not Political!' Whoopi Insists as 'View' Fights Over School Walkouts.  On the March 14 edition of the table's "Hot Topics," the co-hosts of ABC's The View opened the show by having a heated argument over the nationwide walkouts happening in schools everywhere today [3/14/2018], in protest of the Parkland school shooting.  Lone conservative co-host Meghan McCain let the others lead the conversation for several minutes, saying she respected the students' right to protest, before adding that she didn't like how these protests and pro-gun people were being covered by the media.  As soon as McCain started to argue her view, co-host Whoopi Goldberg kept shutting her down, saying she was entirely wrong on the reason for these protests.  The argument started when mid-conversation, McCain said she wondered how teens from red states and "gun country" felt about these protests.  Whoopi immediately defended the protests as completely separate from an anti-NRA narrative.

Meet the Conservative Parkland Massacre Survivor the Media Has Largely Ignored.  With his parents' permission, I agreed to meet him.  He has a lot to say but can't help but wonder aloud if many in the mainstream media have any interest in listening.  Some of his schoolmates have gained prominence as television mainstays in the aftermath of the killings, their opinions validated with verified social media statuses, amassing millions of followers in the process.  Kashuv is just as much a Parkland survivor as now-familiar names like David Hogg and Cameron Kasky, yet his views have only garnered limited attention.

Gun Laws and the Second Amendment.  For years now, the media and politicians have repeatedly been educated on the truths and facts of the AR-15, yet they choose to continue to intentionally inaccurately describe this firearm and its capabilities to influence Americans to support anti-gun proposals.  The news media is supposed to educate and inform its viewers and allow them to form their own conclusions, but instead, it feeds and manipulates them towards their preferred outcomes.  This is a very scary thing.

The First Amendment Is In Far Greater Danger Than The Second.  A case in point of this change has been the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting.  Despite the complexity of the issues involved and the diversity of views held by Americans as to the proper response, the elites have pursued a scorched earth campaign against those who do not hold their black-and-white views on guns.  In the news media, a narrative emphasizing the immediate necessity of national gun control legislation has become a 24-hour rallying cry, with victims of the tragedy exploited to advance this narrative and brand those who disagree as somehow complicit in the violence.  Meanwhile, corporations have begun to sever ties with the NRA, sending a message that only one side of the debate is socially acceptable while the other is deserving of punishment. [...] Make no mistake:  an America with total elite control over the population and where dissent from their views is vilified is not an America at all.

Lefty admits it is anti-gun hysteria.  The Fake News press finally is winning as it feeds a storyline that could have come from Stalin.  The press ignored the systemic failure of the government to stop a killer.  The FBI ignored tips.  The school system and the sheriff's office worked to not arrest or even suspend delinquents, in an effort to hide racial discrepancies in crime and misbehavior among students.  The Obama administration praised this.  Finally, the sheriff ordered his deputies to stand down, as if he were the mayor of Baltimore.  They even blocked paramedics.  Instead of blaming government, the media selected the National Rifle Association as the whipping boy for Obama, Sheriff Scott Israel, and Broward County Schools superintendent Robert Runcie.

Parkland Shooting:  Questions the Left Can't Answer.  Days after the shooting, CNN hosted a town hall meeting.  Rather than a thoughtful discussion regarding causes and potential solutions, it lived up to CNN's goal of a political rally.  Yet CNN claims that its meeting was not political.  Could CNN pour a cup of coffee without it being political?  Did CNN stack the audience and prep participants?  CNN has a history of planting Democrats in its town hall meetings.  One participant claimed that CNN gave him scripted questions to ask.  Plausible?  Isn't CNN the network that supplied Hillary Clinton with debate questions in advance?  CNN turned their town hall meeting into a Dana Loesch- and Marco Rubio-bashing fest.

16 Stupidest Comments About the Parkland Shooting Massacre (So Far).  In the wake of the Parkland school shooting massacre, and in order to deflect away from the only answer to this contagion of school shootings (which of course is hardening school security), our media and the left in general have to manufacture one stupid-hour after another in order to keep the focus on gun-grabbing.  The results of this cynical and desperate crusade have not only exposed these provincial elites as completely opposed to keeping our children safe, but as liars, and morons.  Here are the 16 most dishonest and/or stupidest things we have heard so far...

Laughably Stupid Media Mistakes In Gun Reporting:  How Much Do They Matter?  As surely as night follows day, a mass shooting is followed by national grief, cries of "politicization" and various forms of kabuki (blustery speeches, staged "town hall" events augmented with social media thoughts and prayers, and of course, hashtags). [...] Part of the massacre-grief-anger-blame cycle includes journalists too-frequently beclowning themselves with stunningly idiotic statement about firearms.

An Open Letter to David Hogg.  One of the most vociferous agitators is a survivor of the shooting in Parkland.  He has taken to speaking for all the students of the school and has pushed himself forward to be a strident voice for the victims.  Although he has been all over the airwaves from CNN and MSNBC to late night shows to do nothing more than to force on citizens the progressive socialist talking points of gun control.  There have been many [...] other survivors of the Parkland shooting who disagree with his anti-gun position, and they, like everyone else who disagrees with him have been shouted down and ridiculed for disagreeing with him.

Weaponizing Our Kids.  It didn't take long to politicize the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.  Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, and Sheriff Scott Israel became household names in no time flat.  As darlings of the media, the trio's itineraries have been filled to the brim with astonishing speed.  But there is a reason Colton Haab, another a survivor of the Florida shooting, hasn't enjoyed quite the same level of coverage.  Haab, a Junior ROTC cadet, protected his fellow classmates from the shooter.  He is by every conceivable standard a hero, yet he is not the face of this burgeoning youth movement about which we've heard so much this week.

Entire Town Hall Scripted.  The entire media sets up a week-long hatefest aimed at the NRA, culminating in that shameful fake "Town Hall," and then the very next day it comes out that there was a police officer there who was too cowardly to do anything, and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, who was shaming and lecturing gun owners the night before, must have known it while he was up there on stage.

MSNBC Host:  Handgun Bullets Are Ineffective In Stopping School Shooters Because They're Too Slow.  Talk about a facepalm moment.  Is it the media's stupidity or stacking sandbags because they know this National Rifle Association initiative could gain traction?  You decide.  The NRA wants more armed guards in schools.  Teachers should be allowed to carry as well.  After the tragic Sandy Hook shooting, the school board voted to approve this proposal.  This is not an alien concept.

CNN Analyst Suggests Women Can't Carry Guns Because They Wear Skirts, Dresses.  A CNN analyst insisted Saturday that arming school teachers is impractical, arguing that women who wear skirts and dresses can not carry guns on their person.  "A lot of these schools — Sandy Hook had an all-female faculty, from principal to teachers," noted CNN senior law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes.  "For a woman, where are you going to hide that gun during the day?"

Dimwit Florida Sheriff Was 'Once a Proud Member of Team Obama'.  A horrific event like a school shooting like that which occurred in Parkland, Fla., arouses the impulse to weigh in with opinions based on incomplete or even false information.  It is best to resist this impulse.  Others, of course, with endless hours of air time to fill, and with agendas to push along, are unable to resist it.  There may be more egregious examples of this, but I don't see how anyone can compete with the CNN's recent "town hall," at which Sen. Marco Rubio and Dana Loesch were mocked and browbeaten by what amounted to little more than an angry mob.

Dana Loesch:  CNN Doesn't Do Town Halls on Gun Violence With 'Grieving Black Mothers in Chicago'.  During her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday [2/22/2018], conservative author, radio host, and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch questioned why CNN does not host town halls for the "thousands of grieving black mothers in Chicago every weekend" whose sons and daughters are the victims of rampant gun violence.  She also wondered why they don't hold televised town halls for the victims of illegal aliens in sanctuary cities.

Journalists target Second Amendment and NRA.  The Parkland, Florida high school shooting that left 17 people dead is a textbook example of how supposedly neutral journalists promote a left-wing agenda — in this case, by showing overwhelming support for gun control.

Nikolas Cruz Is the Result of 'It Takes a Village'.  Does everyone see what the Democrats have done?  They've pitted children against us, thereby mainstreaming and normalizing child exploitation.  What the Democrats did to Parkland student Emma Gonzalez was as sickening a display as any I've ever witnessed.  They coaxed an understandably distraught child to spew one debunked Democrat lie after another — and, of course, plenty of invective toward President Trump.  David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland student, asked on CNN:  "If you can't get elected without taking money from child murderers, why are you running?"  Normal question from a 17-year-old, right?  Wondering aloud if he came up with that question all on his own, with such emotionally vivid lingual sophistication and political acumen, must make me a grumpy old gun nut who thinks our youth are stupid.

Dana Loesch Is Right:  CNN Host Stood by as NRA Called 'Child Murderers'.  CNN host Alisyn Camerota told National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch on Friday that she had never let the NRA be characterized as "child murderers" without pushing back, but Camerota did allow that accusation to go unchallenged on her program on Monday.  On Friday's [2/23/2018] "New Day," Camerota interviewed Loesch, who has been criticized for saying at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday that "many in legacy media love mass shootings" due to the ratings they generate.  Camerota expressed outrage at Loesch's comments, saying it was "just malicious" that she would say that about the press.

Second person accuses CNN of trying to direct the narrative at gun town hall.  The father of a survivor of last week's school shooting in Parkland, Fla., said Thursday night [2/22/2018] that a CNN producer "insinuated" to him that the network was looking for people to interview that would "espouse a certain narrative."  Andrew Klein, whose daughter survived the school shooting, told Laura Ingraham on Fox News Thursday that he spoke to a CNN producer the day after the shooting, Feb. 15., and he took away from the conversation that they wanted to interview people that wanted to talk about the "policy implications of what happened in terms of preventing future mass shootings."

Video:  Parkland Survivor's Father Details CNN's Anti-Gun Bias.  Andrew Klein, the father of a Parkland survivor, recalls a conversation he had with a CNN producer the day after the Florida shooting. [...] CNN seems to be cherry-picking every social-justicey, anti-gun survivor from the bunch and giving them the spotlight.  Hence, the surplus of shaven-headed girls and weak-jawed, effete males who recoil at the very sight of lead-slinging devices.  Especially the black, scary-looking ones.  This father is not the first person to question CNN's motives in the wake of Parkland.  There's been much talk of scripted questions already.

Florida Shooter Survivor's Father:  CNN Sought Out Political Statements for Interview.  CNN has turned a number of the survivors of the Parkland school shooting in Florida into mini-celebrities in the wake of the massacre.  It is seldom the case that survivors of these tragedies do speak out, so you can't blame the network for giving them airtime.  But we can blame CNN for using these survivors of a tragedy as pawns for gun control.  While we don't mean to attack the students personally, having survived such a tragedy doesn't add any validity to their calls for gun control, especially since I haven't seen any actual concrete proposals from these students.  I've just seen them call for "action."  What kind of action exactly?  Who knows — just "action."  They also want politicians to "do something."  What that something is isn't explained.  Likewise, views of the Parkland survivors who don't believe gun control is the answer aren't any more valid either, but they do exist, and CNN is not giving them airtime.  In fact, the only time CNN almost gave one of the pro-gun students a platform was at their recent town-hall event with Dana Loesch.  In that case, they wouldn't allow him to express his actual beliefs.

CNN Pimps Traumatized Kids To Push Politics.  Conservatives Should Boycott The Network.  CNN so desperately seeks to manipulate its audience's emotions because the facts uniformly refute its gun-grabbing agenda.  No gun control law proposed in recent years would have prevented this massacre.  Over 98% of mass shootings occur in "gun-free zones," according to the Crime Prevention Research Center.  According to the FBI, twice as many people are killed annually by hands and feet than by rifles of any kind, including the dread Armalite (AR) 15.  Two-thirds of annual gun deaths are suicides, mostly by middle-aged men.  Gun homicides in the United States have declined by almost 50% since 1993.  The gun-grab laws advocated by CNN would deprive Americans of their constitutionally-protected civil rights and not save one single life.  Conservatives should respond without mercy.  CNN impugns our motives and tactics; let's relentlessly expose theirs.

CNN Scrambles:  Denies 'Scripted Question,' Invites Pro-Gun Student to Appear.  CNN issued a statement Thursday morning denying that it had asked a shooting survivor to ask a "scripted question" at the CNN Town Hall on guns on Wednesday evening [2/21/2018] in Sunrise, Florida.  On Wednesday evening, junior Colton Haab, a survivor of last week's mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, told local Fort Lauderdale ABC affiliate WPLG that CNN had invited him to appear at the town hall, but he had withdrawn after being asked to recite a "scripted" question.

CNN host Brooke Baldwin gets hostile with Florida Republican over gun debate.  To understand this you really have to watch the first 10 minutes.  At first Baldwin lets Republican Matt Caldwell say his peace about why Republicans voted down an assault weapons ban in the legislature yesterday, 71-34.  But once he was done and they started going back and forth, you could see how hostile Baldwin was getting over the fact that Caldwell refused to concede that an assault weapons ban would be effective.  She gets snippy with him a couple of times, even telling him at one point to "Stop going back to the talking points, sir!"  It's very clear where her loyalties lie on this issue.  Very clear.

CNN: Trump Shouldn't Call Mass Shooter A 'Sicko' Because It's Stigmatizing.  Would somebody explain to me why anybody is mad at the NRA (I mean, rationally) and why is anybody mad at Donald Trump, and why is anybody mad at the Republican Party?  You take a look at what happened in this entire event, and everywhere you look you find a failure at every level of some agency of government.  You don't find failure the NRA, and Donald Trump had nothing to do with it.  We had a deputy that was there, a deputy who was armed, a deputy who heard the shots, a deputy who was there and could have gone into that school and done his duty as he's trained to do.

Dana Loesch Butts Heads With CNN Anchor Over Shooting Coverage.  National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch went head-to-head with CNN's Alisyn Camerota over the network's coverage of last week's school shooting in Parkland, Florida.  During Loesch's speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday, she accused the media of loving mass shootings because of the ratings.  Camerota told Loesch during a CNN interview on Friday [2/23/2018] that those claims were "malicious" and that "no one in the media loves mass shootings."  "You're saying that it's malicious, but yet on your network you've allowed accusations against me and millions of law-abiding Americans to be indicted as child murderers," Loesch responded.  "I've watched you, Alisyn, on your program."  [Video clip]

CNN Fails to Disclose Former Handgun Control, Inc.  Spokesman Role of Jake Tapper, Host of CNN Parkland School Shooting Town Hall.  CNN's Jake Tapper, host of the town hall held Wednesday night in Sunrise, Florida on the February 14 Parkland school massacre worked in 1997 as a spokesman for Handgun Control, Inc., the precursor to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.  CNN and Tapper have failed to disclose Tapper's anti-gun activism in advance of the town hall.

Broward County Student Reaffirms CNN Demanded Only Their Pre-approved Scripted Question for Town Hall Event.  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor Colton Haab appeared on FOX News' with Tucker Carlson to talk about his decision to withdraw from the CNN Town Hall event after their producer, Carrie Stevenson, demanded that he follow only the approved scripted question provided by CNN.  [Video clip]

CNN's Pro-Gun Control 'Children's Crusade' Exploited Grieving Students And Parents.  It's bad enough that the students of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School have been traumatized by the mass shooting by a former student that claimed 17 lives.  But gun control extremists in the media, Hollywood and Democratic Party now are exploiting them to achieve their dubious agenda of eliminating the Second Amendment.

CNN's Insane Anti-Gun Townhall Will Only Help The NRA.  Last night's CNN town hall amounted to a massive in-kind donation to the National Rifle Association.  It was absolutely astounding.  The problem wasn't the poor students on stage — though a few of them were, as young people are, overwhelmed by the moment and engaged in disrespectful behavior toward the guests — the problem was a crowd that would cheer anything and everything anti-gun, including in one of the more extreme moments shouting "You're a murderer" at NRA representative Dana Loesch.  One Parkland High School JROTC member refused to participate after being told he couldn't ask his question about having armed guards in school.  The crowd even booed when Loesch brought up a rape survivor who is pro-gun.  That was the level of intelligence put on screen, to the point that at varied junctures Jake Tapper attempted to quiet the crowd or ask for respect, to no avail.  The attendees openly cheered for seizing roughly half the guns in the country, even as politicians from both parties presented these ideas as ridiculous.

Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama Praise Parkland Students For Pushing Gun Control.  CNN and others in the fake news media are deliberately ignoring students who support the Second Amendment.  Furthermore, they aren't interviewing students who feel the media is disrespecting the victims by pushing the gun control narrative.

CNN Refused to Allow Florida Shooting Hero Colton Haab to Ask Questions at Town Hall That Didn't Fit Their Narrative.  [Colton] Haab is the brave 17-year-old member of the Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps who ushered 60 to 70 people to safety in an open JROTC room during the Parkland school shooting.  The high school junior may have saved many lives by using the Kevlar sheets from the marksmanship program to try and protect his peers.  His actions were so important that the US Military is currently considering awarding him with a JROTC Medal of Heroism.  Despite his heroism, the student told the Local 10 News that he was not allowed to ask his prepared questions at the CNN event.

Potentially Deadly Mass Shooting Thwarted, Ignored by MSM.  Mainstream media (MSM) bias was never more clearly displayed than when it ignored what could have been one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history in favor of the Florida school shooting.  It happened the same day — Valentine's Day — in Amarillo, Texas, when an armed street person entered the Faith City Mission and took between 100 and 150 worshipers hostage.  Joshua Len Jones, age 35, who had been attending the morning service, left the building, retrieved a handgun, reentered the building, and threatened worshipers with it[.]  The MSM was no doubt alerted by local media as soon as the event took place.  But what unfolded would not serve their anti-gun agenda and be the headline in the evening news.  "Man with nasty hateful dangerous probably illegal firearm shoots and kills dozens" would scream the headline.  One Clay Murdock, a student at the mission, refused to run or hide.  Instead, he chose to run toward danger, tackling Jones with the help of other church security people.  As far as the MSM was concerned, that was the end of the story:  no shooting, no one killed or injured, a nothing burger, move on, looking for something else to cover.

CNN busted trying to put scripted words in mouth of hero Stoneman Douglas student at televised town hall.  CNN would be the object of humor if its behavior were not so contemptible.  Coming in the wake of its disgrace over using chyrons to proclaim President Trump a liar, giving up all pretense of objectivity, the latest scandal reveals an active propaganda effort to manufacture fake questions from real children, even from a boy hero who used his body to protect others during the shooting at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School.  The narrative favoring the Democrats takes precedence over anything faintly resembling genuine discussion of the real views of the people who were victims of the shooting.

Former Handgun Control, Inc.  Spokesman Jake Tapper Hosts CNN Parkland School Shooting Town Hall.  CNN's Jake Tapper, host of the town hall held Wednesday night [2/21/2018] in Sunrise, Florida on the February 14 Parkland school massacre worked in 1997 as a spokesman for Handgun Control, Inc., the precursor to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.  CNN and Tapper have failed to disclose Tapper's anti-gun activism in advance of the town hall.

Shooting Survivor:  CNN Gave Me "Scripted Question" After Denying Question About Armed Guards.  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab said he was approached by CNN to ask a question at Wednesday night's town hall but decided not to after the network gave him a "scripted question," quashing one he wrote himself.  Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC shielded students while the school was under attack from the shooter, said he was going to ask about using veterans as armed security guards.  "CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted," Haab told WPLG-TV.

The Very Fair And Balanced "Students Stand Up To Evil Gun Owners" CNN Town Hall.  Think I'm being snarky with the headline?  The actual network-approved title of tonight's event is "Stand Up:  The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action."  This is an advocacy event, not a "news program," and they're making no bones about it.  I did some cursory googling this morning to see if CNN has ever hosted something so overtly biased towards one side's position on a hot-button issue and came up empty.  By comparison, the debate they hosted on taxes in November between Bernie Sanders and Maria Cantwell on one side and Ted Cruz and Tim Scott on the other was titled, prosaically, "The Fight Over Tax Reform."  They could have done that with this event too — "The Fight Over Guns," "Americans On Guns," whatever.  But this isn't a debate or a town hall in the proper sense, even though both sides will be represented.  It's a showcase for very sympathetic victims on one side but not, a la Steve Scalise, on the other.

CNN town hall mob jeers Dana Loesch for ... mentioning a rape victim who wished she had a gun.  Another charming moment from last night's trainwreck via the Free Beacon.  Why are they jeering?  Tapper's asking here about age limits on gun ownership, namely, can we really trust teenagers to use guns responsibly?  To which Loesch says, well, we trust them to do so in the military.  But if you don't like that analogy because recruits get training in proper handling of weapons while the average 18-year-old gun owner might not, what about young adults who really do need them for self-defense?  What about Kimberly Corban, says Loesch, who was raped before she turned 21 and has wished ever since that she had had when her assailant attacked?

Town Hall Crowd Jeers NRA Spokeswoman's Story of Rape Survivor Who Wished She Was Armed.  Some members of the crowd at CNN's town hall on guns Wednesday night jeered National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch's story about a young rape survivor who wished she was armed.  Held in Sunrise, Florida, the town hall moderated by Jake Tapper allowed students, faculty and parents connected to Stoneman Douglas High School to ask questions about gun laws and possible reforms, in the wake of last week's mass shooting at the high school that left 17 dead.  Loesch faced a hostile environment from the start, given the pro-gun control tenor of the audience and questioners.  Asked why the NRA didn't support raising the age to buy a semiautomatic rifle from 18 to 21, she pivoted to the story of Kimberly Corban, who was raped in her college dorm at age 20 in 2006.

Dana Loesch Smoothly Cuts Down Broward Sheriff's Posturing At Gun Control Town Hall.  Students, teachers, and parents from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School confronted politicians, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch Wednesday night at a CNN Town Hall, demanding that more be done to protect students and teachers from gun violence on campus.  (Which is something we can all agree on.)  Throughout the event blame was continually [mis]placed on both guns and the NRA. Audience members didn't even try to hide their contempt for the NRA and anyone affiliated with it, and when the spotlight turned to Loesch, their anger boiled over.  Loesch was barely able to get an answer out as the high school students yelled insults at her, unimpeded by manners, teachers, or parents in attendance.  Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, a big fan of gun control, sensed an opportunity to pile on and deflect a little attention from his own agency's failings.

CNN's Chris Cuomo Caught Promoting Fake News Story About Buying AR-15 Without ID.  CNN reporter Chris Cuomo was caught sharing a 'fake news' story about a 20-year-old who was allegedly "able to buy an AR-15 in five minutes" without a valid driver's license.  Problem being, it never happened, and the author of the post, Cody Davis, even admits to it within the body of the story.  Oh, there's no doubt he's trying to convince you that he could have walked out of the store with an AR-15 in five minutes, but there's also no doubt that he definitively did not buy the gun.  In fact, he didn't even fill out the paperwork for the background check.

Anti-Gun School Shooter Witness Rehearses Spoon-fed Lines.  An anti-gun Florida school shooter witness, David Hogg (whose Trump-hating dad works for the FBI), rehearses his spoon-fed lines.  [Video clip]  This is the same kid who repeated the lie that "there were 17 mass shootings so far this year" and Chris Wallace let him get away with it.

Mother of Exploited Shooting Survivor Turns Out to Be A CNN VIP & Anti-Trump Activist.  The mother of a teenager who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting appears to have high level connections at CNN.  "Great VIP tour," said a post by Rebecca Boldrick showing a series of photos taken in 2016 at CNN world headquarters.  Boldrick is the mother of David Hogg, who has gained internet fame for his activism in the days since the shooting.

CNN Faces Growing Criticism Over Use of 'Traumatized' Children to Push Anti-Gun Agenda.  The far-left cable channel CNN is facing a growing storm of criticism over its frequent use of minor children (14 to 17) to further its anti-gun agenda.  Already a number of the children, those who witnessed last week's shooting massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, have made countless appearances on the anti-Trump cable network.  In furtherance of its anti-gun propaganda push, CNN's anti-Trump pundit, Jake Tapper, will host a town hall Wednesday night featuring these children.

Student Anti-Gun Activist [was] Featured In [a] CBS News Story — Six Months Ago.  Multiple videos featuring David Hogg, a survivor of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., have surfaced amidst his rise to prominence as an anti-gun activist that have raised questions, including a television news report in California last year.  CBS Los Angeles featured Hogg as the eyewitness and videographer of a testy encounter between Hogg, a veteran Redondo Beach, Calif., lifeguard and a surfer, who was reportedly Hogg's friend, in August of 2017. [...] Some have wondered if Hogg and fellow activist Emma Gonzalez were being coached through this strange interview on CNN in which both teens demanded the abolition of the National Rifle Association:  [Video clip]

Florida school shooting survivor:  Media is using tragedy to push gun control.  A survivor of the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who was previously interviewed by CNN and MSNBC following the mass shooting, told Fox News he believes certain media outlets are politicizing the tragedy to push gun control.  Brandon Minoff, an 18-year-old senior, said the media is targeting gun control advocates instead of focusing on the 17 lives lost in Wednesday's slaughter.

We Can't Have A Debate About Guns If Liberals Keep Lying About Them.  There's always a lot of emotion after a horrific school shooting, and that's completely understandable.  There is also an immediate push for vague "do-something" gun-control legislation often wholly untethered from the incidents it is purporting to stop, which is less understandable.  Worse, most of these efforts are bolstered by falsehoods and half-truths that make it virtually impossible to have a genuine discussion about the problem.  It's an endless task, but let's just take Joe Scarborough's Washington Post column on the Parkland shooting as an example, since he uses a couple of the most fraudulent talking points about modern gun ownership.

CNN Analyst, MSNBC Hosts Denounce American Exceptionalism Due to a Lack of Gun Control.  On Wednesday [2/14/2018], it didn't take long for the liberal media to move from learning about what happened at the deadly school shooting in Florida and the victims to lobbying for gun control.

Media react to Florida shooting by targeting Trump on guns, and other overt journalistic biases.  Most national journalists seem to hate guns, gun owners and gun defenders.  When the media report on a shooting tragedy they often go after all three.  The Parkland, Florida, high school attack on Wednesday was incredibly horrible.  Seventeen people were killed by a former student known to both police and the FBI.  The bodies weren't cold before many in the news media immediately tried to politicize the tragedy.

Democrats, spare me your hypocrisy on guns.  [I]f you're like me you turn on the news to get information — a set of facts.  If you want opinion, you come to shows like mine, where our prejudices and biases and opinions are made known; there's no false pretenses that you're getting pure objectivity.  Well, if you turned on cable news at any time since the shooting, it's safe to say you didn't get the news.  That's because when it comes to guns, news anchors take off their journalist hats and put on their activist hats.  And they do it without shame or disclaimers because they believe righteousness is the same thing as being right.

Media Push The Claim There Have Been 18 School Shootings In 2018. Here Are The Facts.  In the wake of the horrific school shooting on Wednesday [2/14/2018] at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida, various news outlets, seemingly trying to convince the public that an astronomical number of school shootings have occurred in 2018, promulgated the claim that the Wednesday shooting was the 18th school shooting since January 1, 2018, by running with that narrative at the top of their articles. [...] But that narrative was gleaned from the anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety.  Here are some facts, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the facts: [...]

Oops: Brian Williams' 'Gun Control' Question to Florida Student Backfires.  It's always nice when "journalists" get surprised by the truth.

5 Terrible Things the Media Communicates to Every Potential School Shooter.  In the coming days, we will hear a familiar profile about the Broward County school shooter.  (No, I will not name him, for the reason below.)  He was mentally deficient.  He was a loner.  He expressed violent tendencies.  And likely, if the pattern holds, he was prescribed some kind of drugs to control his behavior.  But there is also a media behavioral profile for these situations, and it is perfectly matched to the desires of a deranged person who would like to go out in a blaze of glory.

Reporter Becky Griffin:  Fewer Mass Shootings if More Babies Were Aborted.  Reporter-model Becky Griffin took to Twitter on Thursday [2/15/2018] and responded to Wednesday's mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida by insinuating that [the] alleged shooter [...] wouldn't have carried out mass murder if his mother had aborted him instead of putting him up for adoption.  "Woman puts baby up for adoption, he grows up to be a violent young man who will spend the rest of his life in prison for a mass murder.  Tell me more about how abortions are wrong," Griffin wrote, in a tweet that went viral on Thursday, [...]

Tucker Carlson:  They Call It Gun Control But It's Not — It's People Control.  Thursday [2/15/2018], Fox News Channel's Tucker Carlson responded to calls from the left for gun control in the wake of Wednesday's mass shooting in Parkland, FL.  The "Tucker Carlson Tonight" host theorized some Democratic politicians and "blustery charlatans in the media" had much darker aims with their calls for gun control, which he argued had little to do with public safety.

MSNBC's Scarborough Says There Are 33,000 Gun Deaths Every Year.  Here's What He's Not Telling You.  On Thursday morning, discussing the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough quoted a misleading statistic in order to emphasize how dangerous he thought guns were, saying there are 33,000 people killed by guns in America every year.  Scarborough said to co-host Mika Brzezinski, "Mika, here we are again.  More than 33,000 people are killed by guns in the United States every year.  That's according to the CDC. 33,000. We've had 1,607 mass shootings since Sandy Hook when we said, 'Never again.'"  There's one key factor that Scarborough left out:  the huge percentage of gun deaths by suicide.

BBC Curious As To Why Guns Sales Spike At Christmas.  I guess being British and all, they didn't seem to understand why gun sales seem to spike at Christmas time.  Maybe they figured "peace on Earth, goodwill to men" meant people would trust in the holiday season more than in Glock, Ruger, and Remington or something. [...] People give one another firearms for Christmas.  How is this surprising?  Well, it's probably because that's not an option in the UK.  They've long forfeited their right to keep and bear arms, so now that's not even an option for them.  As a result, they're stunned that it happens.  The BBC did report on the legalities of giving guns, probably because they're surprised you can do it.

How The Media Tries To Pressure Gun Rights Advocates Into Gun Control Support.  Despite claims to the contrary, gun rights advocates are a large and active voting block.  There's a reason lawmakers in pro-gun regions — regions that make up the bulk of the nation — make it a point to present their pro-gun credentials when running for office.  While polls occasionally claim most people support some kind of gun control, those polls rarely delve deeper into how important the issue is for those people.  Most don't so much support new regulations so much as think, "Yeah, sounds good."  In their minds, however, there are bigger issues to tackle and so they don't care enough about gun control for it to make a difference in their voting.

GOP-led House passes bill making it easier for gun owners to carry concealed weapons across state lines.  Republicans rammed a bill through the House on Wednesday [12/6/2017] that would make it easier for gun owners to legally carry concealed weapons across state lines, the first significant action on guns in Congress since mass shootings in Nevada and Texas killed more than 80 people.  The House approved the bill, 231-198, largely along party lines.  The measure would allow gun owners with a state-issued concealed-carry permit to carry a handgun in any state that allows concealed weapons.  It now goes to the Senate.

The Editor says...
Notice that when Democrats have control of the House, a bill can "sail through" or "pass easily," but when Republicans are in the majority, the bills are "rammed" through.

Terrorists Use Banned Guns To Murder 235 Egyptians, Media Fails To Report.  Islamic terrorists ruthlessly murdered at least 235 Egyptians at a mosque on Friday when they detonated a bomb which forced mosque-goers to run outside where the terrorists were waiting with automatic rifles.  Terrorists tried to prevent people from fleeing the area by blowing up cars and using them as roadblocks, Sky News reported.  Officials suspect ISIS to be responsible for the attack, which is being billed as the worst attack in the nation's modern history, as it left at least 235 people dead and over 130 injured, the Daily Mail added.

Video on the Media Lies and Misinformation on Sutherland Springs Shooting.  Steven Crowder does a good job in dissecting the media's willful ignorance about the Sutherland Springs mass killing and citizen intervention.  [Video clip]

Bad Math for Gun Control.  The article is from the University Press at Lamar University. [...] The writer got basic facts wrong, claiming that "The CDC reports 90 people each day are killed by guns (excluding suicides)".  Simple math shows that 90 x 365 = 32,850 deaths a year.  For 2015, there were 36,252 deaths associated with firearms, a bit more than the figure claimed.  But of those deaths, 22,018 of them were suicides, leaving 14,234 deaths for homicides, accidents, and unknown intentions.  Perhaps due to a simple math error, the number of non-suicidal deaths inflicted with a gun were increased from 39 a day (in 2015) to 90 a day.

Gunfight, Home Invader Killed, Headline:  Victim Identified.  Many self defense shootings are not reported in the media.  Many are not entered as justified homicides in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR).  A self defense shooting, which included a justified homicide, occurred in the 800 block of Waugoo Avenue, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin,at night, on November 5th, 2017.  The initial reporting did not include any indication this was a justified self defense shooting.

MSNBC Panel Falsely Claims Heroic Neighbor Didn't End Texas Shooter's Rampage.  On Tuesday's episode of Meet the Press Daily, panelist Yamiche Alcindor and host Chuck Todd incorrectly said Stephen Willeford did not exchange fire with the Texas church shooter or end his attack.  "When I was watching President Trump today, and he was making his argument that [the shooter] was essentially stopped by someone with a gun, I thought he killed himself," Yamiche Alicindor, a national reporter for the New York Times, said.  "There was not a big gun fight, and he was not stopped.  There needs to be a fact check on how it was stopped."  "Right," Chuck Todd responded.  "The narrative with Mike Huckabee and the president is a little bit off the rails."  The facts show that Stephen Willeford did exchange gunfire with the Texas gunman as his attack was still preceding.  The story of Farida Brown, as told to the Washington Post by her son David Brown, makes it clear that at least some of the survivors of the attack credit Willeford with saving their lives.

The News Media Still Can't Cover Shootings.  The Texas shooting was the story of a crazed atheist who killed 26 people and was stopped by an NRA-trained good guy with a gun who thanked God for his "skills."  I bet you already know the punch line:  That wasn't how it was depicted in the press.  Trump even made what CNN called "the 'good guy with a gun' argument," which annoyed Editor-at-large Chris Cillizza.  Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, took a swing at the media over their coverage and summed things up nicely:  "There is a reason why there is public distrust of the media, because the immediate focus is on a political agenda of gun control."  And that was precisely what the media did, interspersed with absurd comments, such as USA Today's bizarre and much-mocked claim that you can get a "chainsaw bayonet" on an AR-15.  Apparently, this is a videogame attachment, so we know what USA Today staffers do during their spare time.

The 'good guy with a gun' had an AR-15.  When a mass murder takes place, the media always focuses on the weapon and downplays focus on the person wielding it, whether it is a vehicle, as in New York City, or a gun, as in Las Vegas and Texas.  Moreover, the media likes to trumpet the term "assault weapon" when talking about an AR-15.  Except when the "good guy with a gun" used an AR-15.  Then it was just a rifle.  Here are some cases in point:  CNN, the NY Post, and NPR.

Libs think you're Stupid.  Are You?  Another mass shooting, this time in a Texas church and we hear the same old mantra from Democrat leaders and the lamestream press.  It's guns.  We need more gun laws to combat right wing hate speech that's driving these incidents.  If you've drunk the Kool-Aid, you don't bother checking the facts and trust that these pseudo intellectuals know what they're talking about. [...] What they will not tell you is that most of these mass killings are committed by jihadists, left wing psychotics and atheists.  They also ignore that it is the hate speech on the left that has spurred attacks on recent innocent victims.

Study Claims Network News Exploited Las Vegas To Push Gun Control Agenda.  Immediately following Las Vegas, gun rights activists knew gun control supporters would go on the offensive.  Those same gun rights activists knew the mainstream media was unlikely to serve as an ally.  Now, a study seems to confirm what so many already suspected.  The network news programs may well have exploited the Las Vegas tragedy to push their gun control agenda. [...] The massive imbalance in the coverage may well explain the supposedly massive support for gun control in a recent poll.  With a near constant bombardment of anti-gun propaganda and no moderating counterpoint, it's not surprising that people may well feel that gun control is the only answer.  Especially since the media made no effort to show any alternatives.

Report: Major Media Networks Favor Gun Control 5 to 1 in Vegas Shooting Coverage.  A media watchdog group released a report on Monday [10/16/2017] that found the three major broadcast networks presented coverage in favor of new gun-control measures nearly 5 times as often as they presented coverage in favor of gun rights during the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting.  The Media Research Center, a conservative nonprofit, said between October 2 and October 8, ABC, NBC, and CBS's news programs spent 30 minutes and 17 seconds arguing in favor of more gun control while only 6 minutes and 27 seconds were dedicated to support for gun rights.  The report, authored by Deputy Research Director Geoffrey Dickens and published on the group's NewsBusters website, examined all statements from anchors, reporters, guests, and soundbites that took a position on gun control or gun rights.

This is left-wing activism, not journalism:
Brokaw Urges Viewers to 'Organize' Against the NRA.  After repeatedly demanding a "national dialogue" about gun control throughout NBC's special coverage of the Las Vegas shooting on Monday, on Tuesday, the former Nightly News anchor abandoned any pretense of being a journalist as he slammed gun owners and urged liberal viewers to politically "organize" against the National Rifle Association.

Liberals' gun control blame game is out of control.  The bodies of the innocent were still strewn on the Las Vegas pavement and the motive of the shooter was a mystery, but the media-political confederacy was certain about who was to blame.  It was American society or, more precisely, those people who don't realize that the Second Amendment isn't worth the parchment it's written on.  Lefty pols had already tweeted their way into the bloody scrum, and that gave the Democratic media all the talking points they needed.  Three of the first four questions at Monday's [10/2/2017] White House press briefing were about gun control, as were more than half the total.  Actually, it is incorrect to call them questions.  They were demands, arguments and opinions with questions marks affixed as fig leaves.

Joe Scarborough Is Enraged That Gun Manufacturers Make Money.  MSNBC's Morning Joe had a CNBC reporter on the program [10/4/2017 (?)] to discuss how gun sales often increase after mass shootings.  People fear the increased talk of gun control after these shooting incidents, and they run out to purchase firearms while they can.  One could argue that MSNBC and their counterparts do more to create these runs on gun sales than the gun companies do, because they're the ones making people fear that their constitutional rights are about to be taken away.  But MSNBC would never admit this part.  Instead, the focus of this piece became a man named Stephen Feinberg, who owns a conglomerate of gun manufacturers.  Joe Scarborough became enraged as he learned that his profits sometimes go up.

The Normalization of Gun Violence Lies.  It takes six months in America to get an x-ray, but you can buy an AR-15 immediately.  That is one of the lies pushed by gun control advocates in the United States.  It is easier to buy a gun in the United States than vote.  Never mind that one needs photographic identification to do the former and, in still many places, not the later.  But again, this is a lie pushed by gun control advocates.  The very people who tell us Donald Trump is a fascist would have us hand over all our guns to him.  The very people who demand Christians provide goods and services to certain weddings or be put out of business tell us we can trust them with our freedom if we give up our guns.  The problem with gun control arguments in the United States is that so many of the gun control advocates lie.  Having never touched a gun, let alone fired one, they make stuff up.  We see this routinely in the news media.

The media doesn't understand guns — and doesn't want to.  The American political left and mainstream media pundits at large do not understand guns.  They are not educated about them and they refuse to learn about them.  They could not tell you the difference between an automatic or semi-automatic firearm.  They don't understand what a suppressor does or does not do.

CBS Inadvertently Admits Gun Restrictions on the Law-Abiding Haven't Worked in Chicago.  On Friday's [8/4/2017] This Morning show, CBS News reporter Adriana Diaz reported on her seven days on the streets of Chicago's South Side, one of the most dangerous and crime-ridden areas in the U.S.  While her report gamely tried to focus on how guns were to blame for the violence, astute observers who know how difficult it is for law-abiding citizens to get guns in the Windy City will notice that, despite those state- and city-imposed barriers, it's still very "easy" for criminals to get guns.

New York Times guilty of large screw-up on climate-change story.  That correction, which sits at the foot of the story, dutifully straightens out the record.  Yet given the magnitude of the screw-up, it should sit atop the story, surrounded by red flashing lights and perhaps an audio track to instruct readers:  Warning:  This story once peddled a faulty and damaging premise.  That premise suggests that the Trump administration is stifling a damaging draft report — part of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment — with dire warnings about climate change.

Progressive Journalists Are Outraged At The NRA For Pointing Out Leftist Violence.  Barely two weeks after a progressive Democrat activist attempted a mass assassination of Republican officials, progressives are outraged at the NRA for noting that the Second Amendment gives people the right to defend themselves, with arms if necessary, from people who might try to assassinate them or their families.  You might not remember it because the news media pivoted away from the story as quickly as possible, but just two weeks ago an anti-Trump Bernie Bro tried to assassinate a bunch of elected Republican officials while they practiced for the annual bipartisan Congressional baseball game.  Just days after the New York Times revealed that Republicans regularly practiced at a public park in Alexandria with minimal protective detail, the shooter showed up at the park and started surveilling it.  According to the FBI, he even took pictures of the location.  Before opening fire on the lawmakers, the shooter also confirmed that the assembled officials were Republicans.

Infuriating: Gun 'Expert' on NBC Doesn't Know How Guns Work.  Evy Poumpouras, a correspondent and security analyst for NBC, MSNBC, CNN, and HLN, was invited on NBC to give expert opinion on the assassination attempt of congressional Republicans on Wednesday [6/14/2017].  This former Secret Service agent under President Obama and current cast member on the CBS show Hunted inaccurately described how semiautomatic rifles and pistols function.  Her remarks are what continue pushing the narrative that assault rifles are somehow more deadly than other firearms.

'Gray Lady' Loses Her Mind:  NYT Claims Trump Is Helping Terrorists.  The New York Times, the once-respected newspaper of record, posted a shockingly distasteful, dishonest, and ironically self-defeating editorial Monday titled "Shunning Gun Control, Helping Terrorists."  In the piece, The Times editorial board claimed President Trump's desire to defend the Second Amendment and skepticism of the Left's proposed anti-gun measures help radical Islamic terrorists.  The Times noted a pro-Second Amendment tweet of Trump's, written following the latest Islamic terrorist attack in the United Kingdom.  "Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now?" he tweeted at the time.  "That's because they used knives and a truck!"

Female Conservative Suspended, Loses Gig at St. Louis Paper After Pro-NRA Column.  On Monday [5/1/2017], conservative columnist Stacy Washington was suspended/terminated from her job as a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and companion website stltoday.com after she defended the National Rifle Association (NRA) on April 28 from a ludicrous suggestion that they're similar to ISIS.  The paper claimed in a statement explaining her suspension and termination that she would "no longer appear in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch" because, according to them, "[h]er active promotional activities and professional association with the National Rifle Association represented an unacceptable conflict of interest in her most recent column, which resulted in our suspension of her work."

Daily newspaper columnist who defended NRA quits after suspension.  A conservative columnist who was suspended by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after she defended the National Rifle Association from comparisons to ISIS fired back with her resignation and a series of targeted tweets.  The newspaper on Friday [4/28/2017] suspended Stacy Washington after a column entitled "Guns and the Media" disputed an anti-NRA article that argued since more Americans die from guns than from ISIS, the Second Amendment advocacy group is the greater danger. [...] The St. Louis Post-Dispatch asserts that Washington was not suspended for the views expressed in her column, but for failing to disclose her promotional work and professional affiliation with the NRA.

NRA vs.  NYT.  Get out the popcorn: the nation's largest and most effective civil rights organization has declared war on the New York Times.  The Times is running an ad campaign portraying itself as a purveyor of truth, a claim that is met with hollow laughter by those who are familiar with the paper's sordid history.  Into the breach steps National Rifle Association commentator Dana Loesch, who — unlike anyone who writes about guns for the Times — knows a great deal about firearms.

PBS Comes Under Fire For Anti-Gun, Anti-Campus Carry Film.  PBS has produced a new short documentary called "Guns on Campus," a look at campus carry at the University of Texas at Austin.  The film is set to air in conjunction with another PBS short film called "Tower," about the 1966 sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin.  While the documentary is made out to be a fair and balanced reporting of the facts, Students for Concealed Carry (SCC) are claiming otherwise.  According to the activist organization, PBS had very little interest in hearing the pro-campus carry stance.

NYT Opinion:  President Trump Should Target Guns Rather than Muslim Terrorists.  A February 11 New York Times opinion piece claims President Trump missed the mark with his executive order on immigration, suggesting he would have kept Americans safer by targeting guns instead of Muslim terrorists.  The author tries to support this suggestion by pointing to things that have caused more American deaths than have been caused by Muslim terrorists.  However, this deductive process is ruined by fact that the author does not bother naming all the things that cause more American deaths than have been caused by guns.

NBC News Spreads Fear, Lies With "Ghost Gun" Fake News.  Here's the thing: former ATF agent Rick Vasquez and Jeff Rossen are boldly and directly lying to the viewers/readers of NBC News.  I know this from firsthand experience, as I've built semi-automatic firearms from the ground up, including AR-15s and an AKM.  You cannot buy "all the parts" for any firearm online and simply slap the pieces together to build a functioning firearm as they mislead viewers, and this is a very easy claim to debunk.  Every firearm made or imported into the United States has a part of the frame or receiver that the ATF recognizes as the actual firearm that carries the serial number.  All the other pieces are just parts.

The Media's Dishonest Reporting on Firearms.  Newspaper accounts of firearms are almost always illiterate and inaccurate.  If you see something described as an AK-47 being used in a crime in the United States, you can be almost certain that it is not an actual AK-47.  (This is not helped by the fact that many different kinds of firearms are marketed under the name AK-47.)  An AK-47 is a select-fire rifle, i.e., a rifle that can be fired in fully automatic or semiautomatic mode, chambered for the 7.62×39mm round.  These are pretty rare beasts in the United States; what's normally meant by "AK-47" is a semiautomatic rifle styled like an AK-47 and/or operating with a similar mechanism, and this elides the fact that one of these things is a full-auto machine gun and one isn't.  Given the rather energetic efforts of the anti-gun lobby and the press to conflate automatic and semiautomatic weapons, one cannot help but think this is at least partly intentional.  In any case, it is misleading and confusing, and therefore bad journalism.  Similar problems come up with other firearms.

Sharia-compliant media want you to think that Somali Muslims in America need to stock up on guns for protection.  Yet it is the Somali Muslim thugs, freeloaders, and jihadists who have been doing all the terrorizing of American neighborhoods in Minnesotastan.

The New York Times' Fictitious Image of Gun Carriers.  Sometimes someone inadvertently performs a public service by bringing an unbelievably stupid and dangerous idea to the surface, where it can be exposed for what it is.  The New York Times can be credited — if that is the word — with performing this public service in a recent editorial against proposals to allow law-abiding citizens to carry concealed guns.  They refer to what they call the National Rifle Association's "fantasy that citizens can stand up to gunmen by shooting it out."  Nobody has suggested any such thing.  Data collected over many years — but almost never seeing the light of day in the New York Times or the rest of the mainstream media — show many thousands of examples of people defending themselves with a gun each year, without having to pull the trigger.

The Gun Industry's Lucrative relationship With Hollywood.  The NRA and the entertainment industry interact publicly as mortal enemies.  But as the number of weapons shown in movies and TV steadily increases — and stars like Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie make fortunes wielding guns onscreen — a co-dependence that keeps both churning is revealed:  "making the liberal bias a lot of money"

Chicago Tribune:  Obama has been Pro Second Amendment!  Steve Chapman is a writer for the Chicago Tribune.  He has often written about gun legislation.  He stands out at the Tribune as a voice that recognizes reality more often then most.  His writing and viewpoints have been a reasonable voice crying in the wilderness of Chicago.  Unfortunately, he lives in the fantasy bubble of current Progressivism.  It is evident in his recent column excoriating the NRA.  He buys into the leftist propaganda without introspection or examination of facts.  It is an opinion column, but opinions should have a basis in reality.

Forget Being Faster Than Speeding Bullet, CW's 'Supergirl' is Anti-Gun.  If guns were outlawed, there would be no reason to be faster than a speeding bullet.  Then, the world wouldn't need a superhero, and the CW wouldn't have to suck all the fun out of a comic series to produce liberal television.  But in reality, all of these things exist.  In its latest Supergirl episode "Crossfire," the caped protagonist can stop bullets, but she can't stop gun manufacturers.

LA Times Editors Call For Banning All Guns In The United States.  In a editorial posted today [10/24/2016] called 'Microstamping' technology could help police crack down on gun crimes — if the gun lobby allows it, the editorial board of the Times revealed that they want to ban all firearms in the United States by requiring them to be equipped with a fantasy technology that does not exist in a viable form.

New York Times Examines Mass Shootings and Gun Laws.  Every time a horrific crime committed with a gun gets national attention, politicians will usually recommend more stringent gun laws as a response.  (With the phrase "gun control" out of vogue, you usually hear these days about "common sense gun safety laws.")  The New York Times, who last year ran a nearly unprecedented front-page editorial calling for the banning and confiscation of a commonly used and rarely abused class of civilian firearms, investigated today how and whether laws, either existing or proposed, would have impacted "all 130 shootings last year in which four or more people were shot, at least one fatally, and investigators identified at least one attacker."

The Huffington Post Is Now Actively Encouraging Felony Gun Theft.  The editors of the Huffington Post have always reliably been for gun control, but now they've taken the shocking step of publishing a story promoting felony gun theft.

Uneducated NBC Reporter Attempts to Talk Gun Control.  "Investigative reporter" — and I use that term lightly — Chris Vanderveen of KUSA in Denver, Colorado decided to "start a new conversation on guns" by penning an OpEd on the NBC affiliate's website. [...] If you're an "investigative reporter," why are you taking stances on political issues?  What happened to unbiased journalism, where you report the facts and let people interpret those facts however they choose?

One of the Most Biased Anti-Gun 'News' Articles I've Seen in Some Time.  It's obvious that most articles about guns in the media are biased against our Second Amendment rights, certainly.  Many are at least biased in that their facts and terminology are so badly garbled that incorrect analysis results.  But a recent piece in a British newspaper is the most blatantly biased I've seen in some time.  For the British Express, hack writer Oli Smith uncorked a piece on the controversial proposal to allow a mosque to be built in Newton County, Georgia, that is so filled with lies, scare words, and hyperbole that it is impossible to believe it is being presented as a "news" story instead of left-wing, invective-filled opinion piece.

The Media Are Lying to Hide Clinton's Animosity to the Second Amendment.  This is the state of "journalism" today.  Members of the media who desperately want Hillary Clinton to be elected president are stooping to unprecedented lows, abandoning all pretenses of impartiality, forfeiting whatever remnant of credibility they might otherwise have, trying to prevent voters from realizing that Hillary Clinton fundamentally opposes the individual right to keep and bear arms.  The Washington Post, to single out one of the worst in this regard, is worried that voters agree with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that if Clinton were elected, she would "essentially abolish the Second Amendment."

Media Launches a Full Frontal on Trump, Gun Owners.  Following Donald Trump's August 9 speech regarding the dangers a Hillary Clinton-nominated Supreme Court poses to the Second Amendment, media outlets around the world responded by intimating Trump was suggesting violence against Clinton.  The media allegations were so extreme, they not only insulted Trump but gun owners as well.

Misleading headine
Misleading Headline of the Month:  AP "Man who shot sleeping intruder".  The above headline must be one of the most misleading that I have seen.  It comes from AP itself.  It is aided and abbetted by the AP leading sentence.  From the washingtontimes.com:  ["]BEND, Ore. (AP) - The man who shot and killed another person asleep inside a Bend home in 2012 is asking a court to throw out a wrongful death lawsuit against him.["]  The intruder was not sleeping.  He was actively fighting the couple that found him asleep in the homeowners house.  There was an extensive investigation, and the shooting was ruled justified.  The story is all over the Internets, with the factually wrong headline and first sentence.


Less Than Complimentary Article On Smith & Wesson.  The author of this article at The Boston Globe, Akilah Johnson, is obviously trying to show the human side of gunsmiths and mechanics at Smith & Wesson as opposed to the ugly, boogeyman portrait the progressives paint.  But it reminds us (1) that Smith & Wesson has no business whatsoever still being ensconced in Springfield, and (2) this would never have to be done in most other locations in America (can you imagine a journalist having to show the human side of gunsmithing in, say, Charlotte, N.C., or Greenville, S.C.?).  Furthermore, this article isn't really very friendly to Smith & Wesson or the place they live for the discerning gun owner.

CBS Issues Correction, Jumped the Gun on AP Bullets Used in Dallas Ambush.  CBS's Scott Pelley had to issue a correction Friday July 15 on CBS Evening News for an overzealous segment on the Dallas ambush he aired on Monday July 11.  In the original report Pelley claimed that so-called armored piercing bullets were used to kill the police, that claim turned out to be false.  "Early in the investigation, a city official told us the ammunition the killer used was armor-piercing," he stated, "Well, now we've learned that the bullets were not the armor-piercing type."

Obama Gun Control doesn't work: 3 children among at least 60 shot over holiday weekend in Obama's hometown of Chicago.  Gun control is a favorite topic of Democrats to divert attention from real issues such as Islamic terrorism.  But, in the real world of the city of Chicago with the toughest gun control laws in the country, people are shot in droves day in day out.  Gun homicides are up an astounding 50%.  And the national media doesn't report any of this strictly for political reasons.

Everything was accurate.  But none of it was true.  [Scroll down]  The points of this narrative:  One, the national media is not interested in accuracy or truth, but in getting the story out first.  Two, it should fit a template, e.g., the nation is racist, law enforcement is prejudiced, and they will frame their narrative accordingly (black male was shot, it was because the "white" Hispanic is racist, there is racism all over the country).  Three, the people doing the reporting have little knowledge of the facts they are discussing, such as what is the difference between an AR-15 and M-16, or "automatic fire" and "semi-automatic fire", and "define what is an assault weapon" ([indeed], so ignorant they should run for Congress).

What's really behind the ongoing push for gun control?  It's not politically correct to say it, but most homicides are gang bangers killing other gang bangers, gang bangers killing people standing near their gang banger targets or gang bangers killing people they've targeted for crime.  Your chance of dying from a gunshot if you are not a gang banger or not committing suicide is 0.0005417721518987342 percent.  The media won't tell you that.

Angry Anti-Gun PR Flack Slams 'Trolls' at NewsBusters for Exposing Her Apolitical PoseWashington Post media blogger Erik Wemple took up a NewsBusters post on Thursday [6/23/2016]:  "NPR issues large correction about stay-at-home mom/gun-control activist."  Wemple wrote "NewsBusters, the very vigilant group that monitors the mainstream media for lefty bias, appears to have pushed NPR toward this step."  But the really jaw-dropping part of the piece was Wemple's interview with Shannon Watts, the allegedly inexperienced new politico NPR originally presented.  Watts spat:  "Here's what happens:  There's a story about me and then immediately the gun lobby and the trolls, they try to pick apart who I am."

The one question reporters failed to ask any of the Democrats about their sit-in protest.  The media orgy over the Democrats' temper tantrum in the House of Representatives has been well documented over the past 24 hours.  But with all the fawning tributes and comparisons to civil rights era protests on the 1960s, one fundamental, logical question seems to have escaped the minds of the hive-mentality media gaggle covering the Pelosi-run publicity stunt.  Let's first point out the so-called "common sense gun safety legislation" these Democrats claim was the impetus behind their fund-raising escapade disguised as a protest.  The crux of their agenda had to do with legislation designed to prevent individuals on the terrorist watch list from buying weapons.  This would deny the right to bear arms to up to a million people because someone in a government office in Washington put their name on a list.  A fundamental, constitutionally protected right would be denied without due process.  It's pretty serious stuff, right?  So, how did the media address the protesters?

Brave Journalist Who Fired An AR-15 Honored By Continuous Memes.  Remember that brave journalist, Gersh Kuntzman?  He risked his life to fire an AR-15 in an attempt to see what it was like.  His harrowing ordeal and the epic response are now being immortalized in the only way we know how in 2016 — a parade of memes!

The Second Amendment Isn't About Hunting or Self-Defense, But Revolution.  Last week, Rolling Stone published an article by David S. Cohen, a law professor who thinks the Second Amendment should be repealed.  "The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact," writes Cohen.  "When the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, there were no weapons remotely like the AR-15 assault rifle and many of the advances of modern weaponry were long from being invented or popularized."  In the wake of the Orlando massacre, Cohen reasons, "now is the time to acknowledge a profound but obvious truth — the Second Amendment is wrong for this country and needs to be jettisoned."  This isn't the first time liberals have mused out loud about whether the Second Amendment is really necessary, or whether it really means individuals have a right to own guns.

Gun debate makes America less safe.  On the morning of Sunday, June 13, 2016, the national press, the president and everyone else in the Democratic Party, and their colleagues in the Republican Party woke up to the sickening news of an Islamic terrorist attack on the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, hours earlier.  What sickened the president and these minions was not the death of 50 gay people, including the assailant, but rather the fear that another Islamic attack in America would help elect Donald Trump.  Our Gollums in Washington immediately worked to change the subject from President Obama's failure to protect the nation.  Sadly, the press and the politicians succeeded.  After casting about for what to blame — homophobia — the press and the politicians went to an old reliable: gun control.  We are talking not about how to root out young Muslim men who want to kill us indiscriminately, the media focused on the gun.  There is not one mainstream media outlet that has not followed this insanity down the rabbit hole.

Liberal Nightmare:  Just One Week After Orlando Massacre, Online Gun Store Sells 30,000 AR-15s.  First of all, and contrary to what the media is saying, the Muslim-driven murderer did not use a dreaded AR-15 rifle in the shooting.  Further it was not a "machine gun," nor a "weapon of war," nor an "automatic weapon."  What the killer did use was a semi-auto Sig Sauer MCX rifle.  Now, with that settled, what happened to gun sales in the aftermath of the murderous rampage will have liberals at their wits end.

Don Lemon Adamantly Denies the Media Is Making Orlando About Gun Control.  On his show last night [6/16/2016], CNN's Don Lemon lashed out at Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany for accusing the media of turning the Orlando shooting into a gun control platform.  Despite evidence to the contrary from his own network, Lemon insisted that the media was not pushing an anti-gun narrative.  "No, the media's not trying the make this about guns," he repeated twice after the McEnany said it.

In a Mass Shooting, Wait and Die?  Or Fight Back?  Regarding the Orlando shooting, notice how quickly the media pivoted from the culpability of a sexually repressed Muslim Afghan registered Democrat mass murderer to an assault on firearms?  Forget Islam and jihad and the Obama administration's resolute determination to fundamentally change the nature of the United States by importing as many Muslims from alien, anti-Christian and anti-Western cultures as possible.  The real problem, in their view, is gun violence.

CNN Asks Rick Scott If He Is Responsible For Orlando Attack Because of FL Gun Laws.  A CNN host on Friday [6/17/2016] repeatedly shifted an interview with Florida Gov.  Rick Scott (R.) on the Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack on a gay Orlando nightclub away from terrorism to discuss gun control instead, even asking if Scott himself could be responsible for the attack because of his state's gun laws.  Pamela Brown continued to press Scott about Florida's gun laws and if he is now willing to reconsider his stance on gun control after meeting with families of the victims.

Despite — or because of — Orlando, weapons fly off shelves at gun show.  [Scroll down]  Hundreds of customers poured in immediately when the doors opened at 10 a.m., and organizers said they were on pace to sell 5,000 tickets at $10 a pop before the show ends Sunday afternoon [6/19/2016].&nnbsp; "My business has quadrupled every day since Sunday," said Casey Burke, a Longwood gun dealer who brought about 4,000 weapons to the show and had already sold several hundred by lunch, which he was much too busy to eat.  "People are afraid of what's about to happen with their [gun] rights and they're voting with the wallets.  I don't blame them.  Gun owners are going to turn into dinosaurs if we don't do something to stop it."

The Editor says...
The writer of this heavily biased article doesn't have a clue.  Ordinary people are not suddenly stocking up on guns because of the Orlando terrorist attack.  They are buying guns as fast as they can because Barack H. Obama and the Democratic Party are openly saying that they want to suspend the Second Amendment and make it nearly impossible to buy guns in the near future.

The entire front page of the Boston Globe pushes a gun ban.  Please note that the Orlando shooter did not — repeat, did not — use an AR-15 in his Islam-inspired terrorist attack.  The weapon he used was a Sig Sauer MCX, not even close to being an AR-15. The fact that the media has chosen the AR-15 as the poster gun for banning "assault" weapons is typical of our dumb as a stone media when it comes to firearms.  But you might note the manipulative, emotional appeal from gun control hysterics.  Since they are unable to use factual arguments, they appeal to the heart and hope people don't catch on that what they are proposing won't stop a single terrorist or nutcase from commiting mass murder.

The Gun Control Hoax:  Perverting The Meaning Of The Second Amendment.  Is anyone else tired of navel-gazing pieces on firearms written by people who know nothing about them?  If you're not, you're in luck!  Slate added another to the trash heap.

New York Times quietly backs away from story on Orlando terrorist's weapon.  After widespread complaints on social media, the New York Times has quietly backed away this afternoon from inaccurate reporting on the weapon used in Saturday's Orlando terror attack.  Second Amendment supporters and others have repeatedly questioned why "AR-15 Rifles Are Beloved, Reviled and a Common Element in Mass Shootings" was so quick to incorrectly draw a common theme between other domestic incidents and this one based on the killer's weapon of choice.

Brokaw: 'In this County,' 'Everything Seems to Get Settled by a Gun'.  Tom Brokaw echoed ABC on Sunday by blaming the terrorist attack in Orlando Florida on the popularity of guns in America.  Twitter is alight with folks weighing in from both sides, people pointing to the Islamic name and others pointing to the use of an AR-15," he remarked on NBC News.  He went on to say that he hoped a meaningful dialogue would come from the event.  Brokaw spoke well after the FBI announced at a press conference that there were possible ties between the shooter and radical Islam.  But Brokaw chose to play it down by simply describing it as, "The worst mass shooting in our country's history."  And exclaimed that, "everything seems to get settled by a gun for whatever reasons."

The Orlando Killer Didn't Use An AR-15 Rifle.  [T]he demonization of the AR-15 rifle has begun in the media.  The usual talking points about its lethality, its rate of fire, and its scariness are coursing through the veins of the anti-gun Left following the Orlando attack.  Omar Mateen committed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history on Sunday morning, which will likely be reclassified as a terrorist attack, when he murdered 49 people at a gay nightclub (Pulse).  As Bob Owens and Streiff noted at Bearing Arms and RedState respectively, Mateen didn't use an AR-15 rifle, but the media has a narrative to dole out.

Media fail:  Orlando terrorist did not use an AR-15.  Since Sunday's terrorist attack on an Orlando gay nightclub, the Democrat-media complex has gone on a tear demonizing the AR-15.  A number of ignorant outlets and biased operators (as opposed to "reporters" who actually try to get the story right) breathlessly reported that the shooter used an AR-15.  Here's an example of the false reporting.  A video at the Washington Post is captioned:  "Orlando shooter Omar Mateen used an AR-15 style rifle to kill at least 49 people, officials say.  Here's what you need to know about the gun some are calling 'the gold standard for mass murder.'"  But, Bob Owens wrote at Bearing Arms, they got it wrong.

ABC Blames Orlando Terror on Election Rhetoric and Guns in America.  On Sunday, even after the FBI hinted the presence of a link to radical Islam, the panel on ABC's This Week blamed the terrorist attack at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida on heated election rhetoric and guns in America.  "I think we all ought to pause with what happened in Orlando today," stated ABC's Matt Dowd when asked if third party candidates could gain supporters, "And if we understand that all of the hateful thoughts become hateful words become hateful actions."  Dowd continued, "And now, maybe in the course of this, after what happened, the temperatures will go down and we, sort of, get back to a place where we can understand the common good."  Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway then argued that America is in need of strong leadership.  "But strong leadership, Kelly, is not about fear mongering and exploiting racial anxieties, and bigotry," snapped The Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel.

Media coordinates, rushes to push "mass shooting" meme as deflection agitprop.  Classic agitprop.  If anyone needs further reminders that the media in the West is not "independent" let alone "impartial", the rush to frame the Narrative of the Islamic terror attack at an Orlando LBGT nightclub during Ramadan as an act of "gun violence" while remaining silent on the overt connections to Islamic intolerance, hate and use of violence and terror as a weapon to intimidate should remove any doubts from your mind.

Media dedicate 54-times more coverage to gorilla than Chicago shooting spree.  In the time since Harambe the gorilla was killed at the Cincinnati Zoo, 69 people have been shot in Chicago — but you wouldn't know it from watching the news.  The death of the gorilla has received 54-times more coverage than the violence in Chicago, according to an analysisfrom the Media Research Center.  The three major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — have dedicated 55 minutes and 7 seconds of coverage to the death of Harambe, but only 1 minute and 1 second to the Chicago shooting spree.

The New York Times is Super Excited About Massive Gun Registration Schemes!.  Despite anti-gunnite talking points, most law abiding gun owners are not against background checks.  We have no problem with making sure that the person attempting to purchase a firearm is not a bad person.  But, do background checks actually stop Bad Guys from getting guns?  For the most part, no.  Hence, the NRA is not suggesting that we do away with the backgrounds check system, they just think it's absurd to expand it, because it will almost never stop a bad character from getting a gun.  And they are against the gun registration schemes of the anti-gunnites, because it is simply a big government control scheme.

Putting the media 'under the gun'.  [Scroll down]  It's hard to know what is worse: "clueless reporters" being manipulated by government officials to spread propaganda, or deceptive reporters manipulating video to spread their own propaganda?  In the latter category, we have the aforementioned Katie Couric documentary which infamously tried to make gun-rights advocates look like they were totally stumped by Couric's "hard-line" questioning.

Audio Shows Katie Couric Documentary Deceptively Edited Interview with Pro-Gun ActivistsUnder the Gun bills itself as a documentary that "examines the events and people who have kept the gun debate fierce and the progress slow, even as gun deaths and mass shootings continue to increase."  It follows a number of gun violence victims and those who have lost family members to gun violence as they advocate for stricter gun control laws.  The 1 hour and 45 minute film was executive produced and narrated by Katie Couric.  Under the Gun has been labeled "dishonest politicking in the guise of media coverage," "loose with the facts," and "a full-length assault on guns and the Second Amendment" by those in the gun community since its debut on May 15.

Katie Couric cooks the facts, burns her reputation.  [Scroll down]  To make her case for more gun regulation she decided to transition from journalism to falsification and propaganda.  Instead of showing the interview question and answer as they actually happened, she edited in an eight-second clip of the group sitting silently and slightly uncomfortably waiting to be interviewed.  Couric clearly wanted to present her question as though she were Perry Mason at the climax of a courtroom drama coming up with a killer debating point that confounded all opposition witnesses.  She wanted it to seem as though no reasonable person could disagree and to present the gun rights group as tacitly acknowledging it by staying silent and looking at their feet.  Oh, Katie, you're so clever, you foxed those foolish gun nuts!

The Fraud In "Gungate" Is Real, And Should End Katie Couric's Career.  As we noted yesterday, a gun rights group, Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), agreed to sit down with a member of Couric's film team for more than two hours of interviews.  Most of the footage ended up on the cutting room floor, but the real scandal was when Couric's team was caught red-handed swapping out the actual answer for one of the questions they asked VCDL with footage of them staring at the floor, making it appear that they didn't have an answer to her question.  That is not what happened.  Stephen Gutowski and his team at the Free Beacon isolated the actual uncut audio footage as part of their coverage of the story, and it proves without a doubt that the VCDL members did have an immediate and detailed response to question.

Katie Couric defends documentary that selectively edited gun advocates.  Yahoo news anchor Katie Couric is standing by her gun documentary, even after the discovery that it was selectively edited to make it appear as if she stumped gun advocates with a simple question about background checks.  In a statement to the Washington Examiner's media desk, Couric said she is "very proud of the film."  The documentary's director, Stephanie Soechtig, told the Examiner, "There are a wide range of views expressed in the film.  My intention was to provide a pause for the viewer to have a moment to consider this important question before presenting the facts on Americans' opinions on background checks."

The Editor says...
Ri-i-i-ight.  If you believe that, you probably won't learn much from the rest of this web page.

Tom Brokaw:  More legal guns will mean more 'homegrown terrorism'.  [Scroll down]  Someone should ask Mr. Brokaw about the "Greatest Generation" whose virtues he loves to extol.  In their heyday, gun ownership was just as common as it is today.  Why did the massive amount of guns they owned fail to generate "homegrown terrorism" but now, just 60-or-so years later, we're supposedly incapable of responsibly handling the things?  Answer that question and you'll have gotten to the real heart of the issue.

Florida news group runs picture of a rifle for story about a pistol.  A Florida newsweekly on Monday [4/25/2016] used a picture of religious liberty activist holding a rifle instead of the pistol that was the subject of its story, and justified it by saying the image of the larger, more powerful firearm was "just too good to pass up."

CBS News: 2nd Amendment Still Unclear, Perhaps Scalia's Replacement Will Help.  On March 13, CBS News contended that the meaning of the Second Amendment is still unclear and suggested it will be up to Antonin Scalia's Supreme Court replacement to help decide whether it refers to individual rights or collective rights for persons in the "militia."  To arrive at such a position CBS News does two things:  1. They admit the Supreme Court's ruling in District of Columbia v Heller (2008) "affirmed an individual's right to keep and bear arms."  2. They cast doubt on whether this decision can be the final by intimating that the real meaning of the Second Amendment is still in doubt among law school professors and members of various think tanks.

Meet The Radical Gun Control Group That Pushes The Anti-Gun Hollywood Agenda.  If you are a gun owner, or even somewhat knowledgeable about guns, sometimes watching television shows or movies can be frustrating.  The depiction of anything firearms-related often seems to have no basis in reality.  You'll see someone stalking another person with a gun, then several minutes into it decide to rack the pistol and actually load a round.  What would that person have done if he encountered his adversary, politely ask him to wait while he loaded his pistol?  You'll see people rack empty guns, then insert the magazine, then shoot the gun.  You'll see people shoot with deadly accuracy pointing from the hip without aiming.  Just today I watched a modern British murder mystery where someone used a "silencer" to make a modern revolver whisper quiet.  Being ignorant of firearms and too lazy to actually learn anything about them for your job is one thing.  Intentionally misrepresenting the truth and slanting your tale to present your leftist agenda surreptitiously is another.

Clueless MSNBC Reporter Goes to Gun Range; It Doesn't End Well.  A MSNBC correspondent on Tuesday [2/23/2016] decided to do a live report from a gun range.  As one could guess, it didn't go well.  Reporter Kerry Sanders pointed at the gun-rights fans and began, "There are lots of folks here who believe that Second Amendment in this country is under attack."  Seconds later, the shooting started.  The Second Amendment afficionados drowned Sanders out.  [Video clip]

Michael Bloomberg: Gun Owners are Poor and Therefore Idiots.  For those who aren't aware, [Michael] Bloomberg is the multi-billionare and sole backer of the Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaigns, and employs Shannon Watts as his spokesman.  Naturally Rolling Stone was falling all over themselves to appease the man who believes his gun control extremism will allow him to skip the line into Heaven, especially when they ask questions like "Tell me why you're still fighting for better gun laws even after leaving office as mayor."  Note the use of the phrase "better" instead of "stricter," as if the interviewer believes in Bloomberg's position as much as the man himself.

Baltimore Sun: Obama Should Create Public Registry Of Gun Owners.  On January 7, The Baltimore Sun gave President Obama kudos for issuing executive orders for gun control, but expressed their desire that he add another measure — a public registry of gun owners.  And the Sun wants the registry to be searchable, so that mothers can look up the parents of their children's friends to see if they keep guns in their homes.

Lt. Governor Dan Patrick Defends Second Amendment on Meet the Press.  Lt. Governor Patrick explained how people in urban areas, particularly women and minorities, are obtaining carry permits in larger and larger numbers.  He refused to fall for the false hypotheticals of the disarmists when Chuck Todd said that open carry was asking for public chaos.  Patrick correctly stated 45 states have it, and they have not had public chaos as a result.  He said that just because some people fear and hate guns is no reason to stop those of us who love guns and the Second Amendment, from exercising are rights.  Patrick is applying the same effective tactic that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and others are.  Do not accept the assumptions of the media cartel.  Call them on their agenda and tell the truth.

Before Barack Obama, We Did Not Have Shootings Like This.  A few days ago in California, Islamic radicals shot up a Christmas party.  Armed with long barrel rifles — not handguns — and an assortment of other instruments of death, they killed more than a dozen people.  The American political left, before the facts became clear, immediately started blaming Republicans, the National Rifle Association and Christians.  Once it was clear that Muslims were involved, the political left looked the other way.  When Bryce Williams killed two reporter colleagues live on air in Virginia, the American left immediately blamed Republicans and the National Rifle Association, and demanded new laws for background checks.  When it was pointed out that Williams had a background check before buying his gun and that he was gay, the story disappeared.

No, Tamir Rice Was Not "Open Carrying," You Race-Baiting Liars.  I'm just as sick of the Tamir Rice case as the next guy, but it's also my job to debunk lies and information on firearms and firearms laws, so I've been sucked back into this story at least one more time to debunk a pair of idiotic articles written by out-of-their depth leftist writers who allege that Tamir Rice was "just open carrying."

Andrea Mitchell Blames 'The South' for New York Gun Violence.  During a segment on her Monday [12/14/2015] MSNBC show using the third anniversary of the Newtown school shooting to demand gun control, host Andrea Mitchell pleaded for national legislation:  "Andrew Cuomo, the governor who passed really tough gun legislation in New York....  Yet he has said that it is impossible task because you can't do it state by state."  She claimed states that support gun rights were to blame:  "It has to be a national conversation because those guns just come in, in people's trunks from the south and they are actually more valuable because they get sold on the black market in New York City..."

Why the War on Guns Has Failed.  In the wake of the San Bernardino attack, liberals are in a total panic over guns.  The New York Times broke a 95-year precedent to editorialize about gun control on its front page.  But the Times seems restrained compared with the full-on meltdown at the New York Daily News, which has taken to calling the head of the NRA a "terrorist."  I have no desire to rehash the all-too-familiar debate over whether such policies would have their intended effects or whether they'd pass constitutional muster.  Let's just stipulate I am skeptical on both counts.

Media Really Bummed They're Losing The Gun Control Fight.  The Associated Press has looked at what's happened since Sandy Hook, and they've come to realize that their dreams of gutting the Second Amendment have failed spectacularly.

L.A. Times's Steve Lopez Exaggerates Number of Multiple Death Shootings By More Than Threefold.  [Scroll down]  Check the numbers for yourself.  The mass shooting tracker that you guys in Big Media cite for the 355 number is [on the internet].  It breaks down the data, so you can see how many people were killed and wounded in each event.  As Mr. Tuttle says, the true number of mass killings in 2015 (defined as three or more killings) is 67.  If you want to call shootings with two victims "multiple-death shootings" — which stretches the definition of "multiple," but I'll be a sport and let that go — then you can add another 34 more shootings to the total.  But any way you slice it, the number of shootings in which two or more people were killed is 101.  Not 335.

The Media's Inflated 'Mass Shootings' Count Is Wildly Misleading.  [Scroll down]  Consider the mass shooting that took place in Platte, S.D., on September 17, and left six people dead.  It is, by death toll, one of the eight deadliest shootings of 2015.  Why, then, did few people hear about it?  Because the victims were the wife and four children of Scott Westerhuis, who police believed murdered them, then committed suicide.  This was a tragedy.  But it was also a wildly different circumstance than what transpired in Aurora, Colo., or Newtown, Conn.  Likewise, the mass shooting that caused the most injuries this year was the gunfight that took place between two biker gangs in Waco, Texas, in May.  That was a heinous crime.  But, again, it was very different from the targeted assault on Virginia Tech in 2007.

There's a reason you've never heard of Eduardo Sencion, Kesler Dufrene and Salvador Tapia.
The Media's Cover Up of Immigrant Mass Shootings.  The San Bernardino shooting has just happened and the shooters are unknown, but in response to Robert Dear Jr.'s murder of three people at a Colorado Springs shopping mall last week, The New York Times exulted:  "Even as politicians and those in Congress pump up public fears at the supposed threat of refugees fleeing Syria, every day in America people — mostly white men — are walking into movie theaters, restaurants, churches, grade schools and health care centers armed to the teeth, determined to take as many people out as they can."  Mostly white men???  I know it didn't happen here, but is the Times really going to ignore the murder of 130 people in Paris two weeks ago?

Don't Believe the Media!  You must keep in mind that the media industry is exactly that; an industry.  They must make greater and greater profits to satisfy their stockholders.  Dramatic reports of a child that is shot by another child increase ratings much more than reporting that 28 women used a gun to fight off rape today and every day, for that matter (the national average).  A heart rending image of a mother who just lost a child to a drive-by shooting drives ratings much higher than a dry report that violent crime is down in states with the least amount of gun control.  The simple fact is that violence sells! [...] Splashier news makes for more profit.  You can't blame someone for wanting to make more money, even if you disagree with how they do it.  So, it is imperative that you remember that those in control of the media have their own agenda and that agenda does NOT serve YOUR best interest.  Since violence sells and legal unrestricted gun ownership reduces violence, it is in the media's business interest to promote restrictions on legal gun ownership.

There is no Ban on "Gun Violence" Research; The Hill Pushes the Lie.  A recent headline at The Hill read "Dems push to end ban on gun violence research".  The only problem is that there is no ban on "gun violence" research.  There is a ban on spending federal dollars, by the Department of Health and Human Services, on research that advocates for more gun control.

Is There a Gun Violence Epidemic? The Numbers Say No.  Rolling Stone magazine has an entire section on its website dedicated to gun violence entitled "America's gun violence epidemic."  Hillary Clinton recently stated that "this epidemic of gun violence knows no boundaries."  Even the American Public Health Organization states in its section on gun violence that "a comprehensive public health approach to addressing this growing crisis is necessary."  A quick look into the facts reveals an entirely different picture.

Stephanopoulos Omits Arguments Against Barring Guns to Watch List Suspects.  On Sunday's [11/22/2015] This Week, host George Stephanopoulos repeatedly brought up the debate over whether to bar guns from people on the federal terror watch list or the no-fly list without delving into any of the arguments against doing so.  The ABC host brought up the issue with both guests Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson, and raised the issue again during the "Roundtable" segment, but never noted either the specific criticisms that the list gets from both the left and the right, or the argument against tipping off suspects under secret investigation which barring them from purchasing guns would cause.

North Carolina voluntary gun surrender event produces big results.  A staple among the more "reasonable" gun control advocates in America is the voluntary gun turn-in or buy-back program. [...] A staple among the more "reasonable" gun control advocates in America is the voluntary gun turn-in or buy-back program.  And while some offers of this type promise cash or gift certificates in exchange for the surrendered firearms, this one was based on nothing more than the good will of the people.  No money was offered and participants were given the chance to sign a "pledge of non-violence" for the future.  So how did that turn out?  If you read the coverage from this Time Warner Cable News Network report it was a smashing success.

Brace Yourselves — the Media Just Made the Argument Against Gun Control.  Back in October, I covered a Gallup poll that showed the majority of Americans don't support a handgun ban.  At the time, only 27% of Americans said they would support such a ban.  Two studies covered by Legal Insurrection later that month revealed that the Obama Administration's renewed push for stricter controls and limited carry actually runs contrary to the social science of controlling violence and keeping people safe.  The thing is, you'd never know it with the way the mainstream media covers issues like gun control, urban violence, and the Second Amendment.

Media Bias Goes Extreme.  The national and local media bias against the Second Amendment reached bizarre heights this week when a newspaper headline proclaimed "Shooter kills 4; 30 injured."  The problem?  Well, even a casual reader would note that the tragedy described in the article had nothing to do with a "shooter" but was about a individual who drove her car through a homecoming parade at Oklahoma State University.  While the motives of the driver's actions remain unclear, we find it simply incredible that a headline could be so abundantly off the mark.

Pew reveals extent of media brainwashing on guns.  Thanks to the pervasive media obsession with reporting homicides and blaming gun ownership, the public believes, contrary to fact, that homicides and gun deaths are increasing.  As a matter of fact, the number of privately owned guns has soared as gun homicides have fallen.

A Carefully-designed Gun Violence Script: Obama to the Rescue!.  In Montana, the local newspaper is little more than a collection of local colloquialisms surrounded by canned, nonsensical AP (that's Associated Press) drivel that is labeled as news, but better described as propaganda, plain and simple.  There is a script here, and this is the way it has been running. [...]

Three Pinocchios:
Clinton's claim that 40 percent of guns are sold at gun shows and over the Internet.  So where does the 40 percent figure come from?  It is derived from studies that were based on data collected from a survey in 1994, the same year that the Brady Act requirements for background checks came into effect.  In fact, the questions concerned purchases dating as far back as 1991, and the Brady Act went into effect in early 1994 — meaning that some, if not many, of the guns were bought in a pre-Brady environment.  The survey sample was relatively small — just 251 people.  (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.)

Common Core-aligned writing lesson on gun debate fuels claims of political agenda.  Common Core backers are sneaking a social and political agenda into nationalized curriculum, say critics, who now have new ammo in a writing lesson plan for teachers that they say gives a slanted perspective of the gun debate.  A study guide dubbed, "The Battle Over Gun Control," authored by KQED, a northern Californian affiliate of National Public Radio, and the nonprofit, taxpayer-subsidized National Writing Project, states that "moderate gun control" measures introduced following the Sandy Hook school massacre were deep-sixed by the "powerful political influence" of the NRA.  Second Amendment advocates say the wording, in supplemental material designed to help teachers plan instruction, frames the debate in a one-sided fashion aimed at influencing young minds.

Perspective
Perspective on Mass Shootings.  This graphic gives needed perspective on the "epidemic" of mass shootings.  The question an unbiased observer might ask is "Why is such enormous attention given to such a tiny fraction of deaths?  The answer is fairly easy to understand.  The media gains both monetary and political benefits from hyping these shootings.  They gain monetary benefits from increased attention to their programs and advertiser base, but that does not explain why similar mass killings get far less coverage.


5 Obama Scandals The Mainstream Press Is Ignoring.  Every time there's a shooting, gun control takes center stage.  But when illegal immigrants kill and maim, there's not a peep about Obama's failed immigration-enforcement policies.  Where are the tearful stories of families ripped apart by a violent illegal let loose by Obama's immigration department?

Unhinged Daily News Writer Wants NRA Designated A "Terrorist Group".  [Linda] Stasi doesn't explain how she gets the staggering total of 87,423 people "murdered or spree killed via gun or assault rifle," and that's because she can't.  This number is entirely fabricated.  In 2012 there were 8,855 murders committed with a firearm in the United States (just 322 from rifles of all kinds, of which "assault rifles" are only a small part).  In 2013 there were 8,454 murders committed with a firearm in the United States (just 285 from rifles of all kinds, of which "assault rifles" are only a small part).

New York Times Mistates Federal Gun Law, Hillary Gun Record.  The New York Times published a piece Monday [10/5/2015] that misstated federal gun law and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's position on gun control.  In a piece detailing Clinton's new gun control proposals, the paper implied that gun sales made at gun shows or online are different than sales made elsewhere.  "A central issue in Mrs. Clinton's proposals are the background checks on prospective gun buyers, which are required for retailers at stores," New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote in the piece.  "But under federal law, they are not required at gun shows or over the Internet with private sellers."

Columnist: NRA should be placed on State Department's list of terrorist organizations.  Linda Stasi, a columnist for the New York Daily News, has a unique proposal to share with her readers.  She thinks the NRA should be listed on the State Department terrorist list because they are responsible for thousands of gun deaths over the last few years.

The Coming Cultural Shift On Guns, Take 45.  The headline on the Daily Beast in the wake of the shootings at a community college in Roseburg, Ore., didn't exactly come as a surprise.  "The New Crusade for Gun Control: The Brady Campaign hopes we're about to see a cultural shift in the debate over guns and has a plan to capitalize on that change."  What is somewhat surprising is that the press falls for this claim over and over again.  After every gun tragedy, gun control advocates talk about how this latest one is the one that will change American minds about the prevalence of guns in the U.S.  And every time, journalists write about it as though it were a real prospect.  But then, sure enough, gun sales go up after each shooting, and nothing, or next to nothing, gets achieved.

National Media has news blackout on 14 Shot in 15 Hours in Chicago, Why is that?".  I pretty much know the reason has a lot to do with Chicago being Barack Obama's hometown.  Also, Black on Black carnage doesn't fit the corrupt media machine's template.  [Video clip]

NYT's Barro: 'Massive' Gun Grab Only Way To Impact Violent Crime.  Give Josh Barro credit for candor.  When it comes to guns, the New York Times correspondent makes no bones about the kind of draconian, Second Amendment-defying approach he thinks is necessary.  Forget about expanded background checks or other such measures.  The only way to have a "big impact on violent crime," according to Barro, is to emulate Australia and "really take away massive amounts of guns that people have, reduce the rate of gun ownership substantially."

Study Claims Private Gun Ownership Endangers Police.  [T]he study was conducted during the years 1996-2010, which means it missed the fact that New York's gun control got even stricter beginning in 2013 — discouraging gun ownership even further — yet many of the most prominent officer shootings in recent memory took place in NYC.  For example, NYPD Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were gunned down in an ambush attack on December 20, 2014, while sitting in their patrol car.  And on May 2, 2015, NYPD Officer Brian Moore was fatally wounded with a stolen gun.  He died on May 4.  But these attacks on officers were not part of the American Journal of Public Health study.

Andrea Mitchell Tries to Portray Abdulazeez as a Gun Nut.  Desperately looking for a way to avoid pegging the Chattanooga murderer Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez as anything but a terrorist, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell asked a childhood friend of the killer what he liked to do in "small town Tennessee": [...] Abdulzaeez apparently owned some guns, but it is unknown whether he bought them after his return from the Middle East last year.  For a terrorist, guns are a tool of the trade and not a means of self defense or anything to take pleasure from on a hunt.  For Mitchell to try and equate terrorism with the gun culture instead of trying to get to the bottom of the shooter's radicalization is horrible journalism.

Juan Williams: 'I Am Baffled' By Push To Arm Marines In Recruiting Centers.  On July 17 — the day after Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez allegedly opened fire on a recruiting center and then a reserve center, gunning down four US Marines — Fox News' Juan Williams said he is "baffled" by the push to end gun free zones in military recruiting centers.  He said the center which was targeted is in a "strip mall" and that changing the gun-free policy would mean people would be walking around with guns, which could lead to "workplace violence."  He also suggested it could create a situation where a simple "dispute in the parking lot" could escalate into armed confrontation.

The Editor says...
Obviously Juan Williams is completely terrified of guns, has no experience with guns, and doesn't understand what it's like to live in a peaceful city.  His assumption that guns naturally lead to "workplace violence" indicates that he doesn't know much about self-control.  Why don't karate experts beat up their neighbors and co-workers when disputes arise?  Because they exhibit self-control.  Similarly, people who carry concealed weapons know that the consequences of their actions can be permanent, which makes it especially important to refrain from action unless it's unavoidable.  In the Chattanooga case, there was indeed "workplace violence," from which the Marines were unable to defend themselves.

So What Do Liberals Actually Want To Do About Guns?  Earlier this year, Dylann Roof was arrested and charged for felony possession of the prescription-only drug Suboxone.  His case is still pending.  Federal law prohibits people with pending felony charges from obtaining firearms.  Yet, here's how a glaringly misleading Washington Post headline characterizes this federal prohibition:  "The legal loophole that allowed Dylann Roof to get a gun."  The piece, you may not be surprised, doesn't offer a single "legal loophole" that allowed Dylann Roof to obtain a gun.  It only offers up examples of laws that Roof ignored.

Charleston: CNN's Sick Pattern of Using the Dead as Political Weapons Against the Right.  Under the leadership of Jeff Zucker, we have all witnessed CNN turn into The PornTragedy Network, a ghoulish reality show channel that grabs hold of human disasters and milks them dry.  That's bad enough, but CNN goes even further.  If you are paying attention, you will see that every tragedy is also exploited by CNN into a political weapon to be used against their enemies on the Right.  Even before Zucker, when more than a dozen children were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary, CNN went all in on gun control.

Local Media Stunned That Good Guy Could Legally Shoot Bad Guy.  A female Knoxville convenience store clerk is very lucky that her male friend was at the right place at the right time.  The man was sitting in his parked vehicle when he noticed an armed robber force the clerk behind the counter at gunpoint.  The male friend retrieved his own handgun from his vehicle and quickly ended the threat.

'Covering Guns': Columbia University's 'workshop' for journalists far from objective.  Columbia University would never sponsor an event funded by the National Rifle Association.  What's more, the idea would seem especially outlandish if most of the speakers at the event were NRA supporters.  Yet, gun control advocate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his gun control group Everytown are now funding a two-day workshop in Phoenix on Friday and Saturday sponsored by Columbia University's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.  The event will bring together journalists from around the country to learn about "covering guns and gun violence."  Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center, claims that there is "no party line" and calls the workshop "very balanced."

Where's the coverage of heroes who stop mass killings?  Heroic citizens stopping someone from killing a large number of people don't seem to be considered news worthy.  Don't people want to read about a brave soul risking his life by running towards the sound of gunfire while others run away?  Yet, such stories never get national news coverage by the national mainstream media.  While accidental gunshots get national coverage, few people have any idea how often concealed handgun permit holders stopping mass killings.

The protected, connected liberal media elite.  On Dec. 23, 2012, former NBC anchor David Gregory hosted an interview with National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre on "Meet the Press."  As expected, the interview was hostile, with Gregory repeatedly badgering LaPierre over his not supporting a federal high-capacity magazine ban.  But instead of simply talking about 30-round magazines, Gregory brought one on set to wave in front of the cameras.  The problem?  The "Meet the Press" studio is located in Washington, D.C., where merely possessing an empty high-capacity magazine is illegal.

The New York Times doesn't have a clue about the meaning of the Second Amendment.  [Quoting Noah Webster:]  ["]Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe.  The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.["]

Bob Costas: Gun-Rights Backers Want Ability to Buy 'Cop-Killer, Armor-Piercing Bullets'.  This past Friday [3/20/2015], sportscaster (and anti-gun advocate) Bob Costas was on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, where he scoffed at the criticism he's received for making many anti-gun statements:  "Is this what the Founding Fathers had in mind?

Washington Post: Disarming Police Might Save Lives.  On February 18, The Washington Post highlighted five countries where "officers are unarmed when they are on patrol" and suggested that unarmed officers "have saved lives — exactly because they were unable to shoot."  The five countries cited as examples were Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland, and New Zealand.  The WaPo quotes Northern Michigan University Associate Professor Guomundur Oddsson's explanation that "the practice [of using unarmed police] is rooted in tradition and belief that arming the police with guns engenders more gun violence than it prevents."

Finally Obtained: David Gregory Arrest Warrant Affidavit.  This is likely the final chapter in the saga of our two-year long fight to obtain important documents regarding the non-prosecution of David Gregory for possessing on Meet the Press an illegal high-capacity ammunition magazine.  The short version is that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department warned NBC News that it could not possess an actual high-capacity magazine, but NBC News went ahead and did it anyway.

The bias against guns: What the media isn't telling you.  [Late last year] a 2-year-old accidentally shot and killed his mother at a Wal-Mart in rural Idaho.  The victim was Veronica Rutledge, a 29-year-old concealed handgun permit holder.  The child had reached into his mother's purse.  Massive news coverage ensued.  Tragedies like these make headlines.  That's understandable.  But where was the news media on the previous day, when concealed handgun permit holders likely saved multiple lives? [...]

Affleck, Maher: We Own Guns To Protect Our Homes and Families.  During the October 3 airing of Real Time With Bill Maher, guest Ben Affleck joined Maher in talking about owning guns in order to protect their homes and their families.

The FBI's bogus report on mass shootings.  It's disheartening to see the FBI used to promote a political agenda, but that's what we got with the bureau's release last month of a study claiming to show a sharp rise in mass shootings, a la Newtown, Conn.  The FBI counted 160 "mass" or "active" shootings in public places from 2000 to 2013.  Worse, it said these attacks rose from just one in 2000 to 17 in 2013.  Media outlets worldwide gave the "news" extensive coverage.  Too bad the study is remarkably shoddy — slicing the evidence to distort the results.  In fact, mass public shootings have only risen ever so slightly over the last four decades.

Piers Morgan Planning Anti-Gun Documentary.  Sitting comfortably with a new job at the Daily Mail, former CNN host Piers Morgan revealed to Politico's Dylan Byers that he is working on a new anti-gun movie.

You Can't Keep A Good Myth Down.  First, this past Sunday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeated the canard about guns being dangerous to their owners.  A "study in the journal Injury Prevention," he wrote, "found that the purchase of a handgun was associated with 2.4 times the risk of being murdered and 6.8 times the risk of suicide."  No kidding.  As a lifelong subscriber to Injury Prevention, I could have told Kristof that people who live in crime-ridden neighborhoods or who have friends or professions that increase their likelihood of being killed — or who plan to commit suicide — are astronomically more likely to buy handguns than people whose lifestyles do not put them at such risks.

New Jersey Newspapers Call For Mandatory Gun Confiscation.  NJ.com, a consortium of reliably left-wing newspapers in the Garden State, has published an op-ed calling for the scrapping of the Second Amendment: [...] The editorialist then laments that, "We understand this is not going to happen. Neither American courts nor most of the public would support it."  And yet, they champion it still.  There is a smug naivete in the minds of gun control supporters, combined with a basic pagan fervor.

After 30 Years Of Lies, NY Times Admits "Assault Weapons Are A Myth".  In a stunning op-ed released Friday [9/13/2014], the NY Times finally admitted that "assault weapons" are a made-up political term fabricated by anti-gun Democrats.  Op-ed writer Lois Beckett also admitted that once the term was manufactured and used to outlaw a class of weapons that dishonest anti-gun Democrats had used to con an entire nation, nothing happened.

The Stupidest Article About Guns You Will Ever Read.  The link takes you to the instantly infamous piece in Rolling Stone by some poor lassie named Kristen Gwynne entitled, "The Five Most Dangerous Guns in America."

Fox News Clueless About Guns.  When you can't trust an allegedly conservative media outlet to properly cover firearms, it's time to realize that the entire Second Amendment fight is completely up to you.

What is Going on at CNN Lately? Reports on Guns Are Surprisingly Fair As of Late.  Did CNN get bought out and no one knows about it?  I'm not sure what has happened at CNN in the last few weeks, but the network referred to by many conservative Americans as the "Communist News Network" has taken a very sharp turn on their coverage of all things guns recently.

WaPo: Individual Right to Gun Ownership Created by Supreme Court in 2008.  On June 22 Washington Post reporter Robert Barnes argued that the Supreme Court created the individual right to keep and bear arms in 2008, via District of Columbia v. Heller.  No attempt to grapple with our Founding Father's words or intentions was made, but Barnes did make clear his belief that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be key to restricting the right the court allegedly created.

Are Most Mass Murderers Really White?  [Scroll down]  Then again, this all could just be the result of the new Common Core math.  Take Elliot Rodger, for instance.  He killed half his victims with a knife, but the whole focus was on guns.  (And he's widely referred to as a "shooter."  I think he was a slasher.)  He was half Asian, but the whole focus was on whites.  You could also call it situational attribution:  a mixed race person is defined by his minority half when he achieves, as with our first "black" president.  But when such an individual is recognized as having committed a crime, he's suddenly white.  This can only make us wonder how long it will be before Barack Obama becomes white.

The Media Finally Gets The Mass Shooter It Always Wanted.  Remember the retractions from people like The Nation's Eric Alterman and HuffPo's Elise Foley after a DHS report tying Jared Loughner to a white advocacy website turned out to be just "brainstorming"?  Then when even the Anti-Defamation League had trouble claiming Loughner was an anti-Semite, we blamed Sarah Palin, because what kind of adult wouldn't fly into a homicidal rage at the sight of bullseyes on a map?  Then when even that strained credulity, the culprit became "anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism."  You know, the stuff all those hayseeds in flyover country believe.  Nevermind that one of his childhood friends claimed that Loughner's politics were left-wing, he smoked pot, and at one time listened to the radical anti-capitalist band Anti-Flag.

The Media Attempts To Grant "Absolute Moral Authority" To The Gun Control Movement.  So Mr. Martinez wants us to approach his arguments from a rational perspective?  We can do that.  We can start by noting that equating handguns to nuclear weapons is a fallacious argument to be made by schoolchildren, not by serious adults looking for real solutions to a complex problem of balancing the constitutional rights of the individual, the desires of the community, and the will of the state.  Martinez's claim that, "Nobody needs to own three semi-automatic handguns," is likewise a fallacious argument.  No matter how distraught he is at the moment, Mr. Martinez is arguing his opinion.  He is not arguing facts.  His arguments are from the heart.  They are sincere.  They are well-intentioned.  They are also misguided and dangerous.

Don't believe mainstream media mistruths about firearms research.  Support for gun control has been plummeting, reaching its lowest level since such poll questions began.  Gun control advocates are desperate to change this, and they know that the mainstream media is only too happy to repeat whatever questionable "facts" they put out.

Captain Obvious: ABC Warns Americans Not to Hide Rifles at Playgrounds.  The journalists at ABC News offered yet another high profile experiment to terrify the parents of America into not owning guns.  In an hour-long special on Friday night [1/31/2014], Diane Sawyer and David Muir hid pink guns at the playground of an elementary school in an effort to see if young girls would play with them.  Unsurprisingly, the young children did.  The Young Guns program also included the obvious revelation that firearms shouldn't be concealed in backpacks and with candy.

The Editor says...
If James O'Keefe did the same thing, he would get arrested.

Lott hammers ABC News for the network's deceptive anti-gun propaganda.  John Lott, President of the Crime Prevention Research Center, is hammering ABC News for the intentionally one-sided and deceitful anti-gun propaganda-fest that was the network's attempt to scare parents away from gun ownership.

Newspaper chain plans 'state-by- state' concealed weapon databases.  A national newspaper chain with nearly 100 publications and 1.6 million readers is considering building "state-by-state databases" on concealed weapons permit holders, according to an internal e-mail.  The plan, laid out in an email from a top editor at North Carolina-based Civitas Media, could be similar to a controversial project a New York state newspaper carried out in 2012 which included an online map that identified gun owners in two counties by name and address.

Update:
Newspaper boss says gun permit database idea was misfire.  A national newspaper chain never intended to create a multi-state database of gun owners with permits allowing them to carry concealed weapons according to its top executive, who told FoxNews.com a "poorly crafted" internal memo erroneously indicated such an idea was being planned.

After the Fact: Civitas Media Denies Plan to Create Database of Concealed Carry Permit Holders.  On January 24th, a Civitas Media internal memo leaked to the new media describing the newspaper conglomerate's "attempt to build state-by-state databases that list those who have the right to carry a concealed weapon."  Within 24 hours Civitas Media reversed course and now, on January 26th, says the idea never was going to happen to begin with.

The Editor says...
This is a very common Democrat tactic:  They will say or do something outrageous, and if there are any objections, follow up a few days later with, "Can't you take a joke?"  Examples abound:

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37][37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42]

10 Forms of 2013 Media Malpractice.  [#1] Pretend that "no one" is saying something, when they really are.  Carol Costello of CNN claimed in January that "no one is talking about overturning the Second Amendment or confiscating guns in America."  In the three preceding weeks, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had said that "confiscation could be an option"; an Iowa state representative had "said governments should start confiscating semi-automatic rifles and other firearms"; and Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California had suggested a gun-buyback program which "could be compulsory."  In early December, New York City's police department sent out "letters telling gun owners to turn over their rifles and shotguns — or else face the consequences," i.e., confiscation.

The Media's Shooting Bias.  Last week, the lawyer Gabriel Malor compiled a list of recent events that have been unthinkingly blamed on the Right.  Among them are the case of census-taker Bill Sparkman, who hanged himself in Kentucky (the Tea Party was blamed); the case of Joe Stack, a devotee of The Communist Manifesto who flew a plane into an IRS building in 2010 (anti-tax rhetoric was blamed); the case of Obama voter Amy Bishop, who in 2010 shot her fellow faculty members at the University of Alabama (the Tea Party was blamed); the case of misanthropic environmentalist James Lee, who took hostages at the Discovery Channel (climate-change "deniers" were blamed); and the Boston Marathon bombing, which was carried out by jihadists — after right-wingers were blamed and a non-existent and wholly coincidental link with Patriot's Day was mooted.

Guns & Ammo Fires Editor After Publishing Editorial Calling for Gun ControlGuns and Ammo Magazine, the "world's most widely read firearms magazine," has fired contributing editor Dick Metcalf after the publication received immense backlash for its December 2013 issue featuring his editorial advocating for gun control.  "Way too many gun owners still seem to believe that any regulation of the right to keep and bear arms is an infringement," Metcalf wrote in the column titled "Let's Talk Limits."  "The fact is, all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be."

A Quick Note on Weaponry and Language.  I just watched the press conference from Los Angeles airport and I was irritated as usual by the way in which law enforcement agents and politicians who should know better throw around incorrect terminology to the press.  Over and over, we were told that the shooter at LAX used an "assault rifle."  This is now being repeated widely.  There is one key problem with this:  It's not true.  We can argue all day about the silly "assault weapon" term, but "assault rifle" actually has a meaning.  An "assault rifle" means that the rifle can be switched between safe (off, in layman's terms), semi-automatic, and automatic fire.

NPR Admits: More Guns, Less Crime.  When even people like John Kerry and Barack Obama pay no attention to National Public Radio (NPR), must taxpayers be forced to continue subsidizing it?  To its credit, this week NPR ran the following bombshell headline:  "The U.S. Has More Guns, but Russia Has More Murders."  In other words, paraphrasing Dr. John Lott, Jr.:  more guns, less crime.  Welcome aboard, NPR.

An unanswered question in the Navy Yard mass murder.  In a post yesterday, Aleister noted how quickly the media dropped any interest in the politics of the Navy Yard shooter — as soon as it became clear that the was a mentally-ill liberal black man, not a conservative/Tea Party/right-wing white guy. [...] The same phenomenon took place as to the Family Research Council shooter, motivated by a Southern Poverty Law Center hate watch list.  Almost complete media disinterest, including in the sentencing this week.

Why Has The Media Stopped Talking About The Navy Yard Shooter?  The media typically loves stories about people who go on shooting sprees but just a few days after the Navy Yard shooting story broke, no one in the media is talking about it anymore.  Why?  The answer is pretty simple.  The story didn't fit the media's preferred gun control narrative.  Had the story been about a white Tea Party member as everyone in the liberal media was hoping, we'd still be bombarded with coverage of the story.  Black guy?  Liberal?  Mentally ill?  The story no longer served any purpose for the left's agenda so it was dropped.

The Media's Hair-Trigger AR-15 Obsession.  The news media seemed to seize on one particular aspect of Monday's [9/16/2013] reprehensible shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.:  reports that the shooter had used an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle that's supposedly the weapon of choice of mass killers.  Several news stations mistakenly reported that Alexis had arrived at the Navy Yard with an AR-15, and that his body was found with a shotgun, a pistol, and that particular rifle.  The FBI now says that he used a shotgun and two pistols, and no AR-15 at all.

L.A., Chicago Rank 1 and 2 for Gun Murders; N.O. Has Highest Rate.  The Los Angeles and Chicago metropolitan areas had the most gun murders among the nation's fifty most-populous metropolitan areas in 2009 and 2010 (the latest years for which data is available), according to a report released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  During those two years, 1,141 people were gunned to death in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and 1,139 were gunned to death in the Chicago metropolitan area.  The New York metropolitan area ranked third with 1,101 gun homicides.

The Editor says...
I read a lot of news articles, and this is the first time I've ever seen a firearm-related homicide described as someone having been "gunned to death."

Montana AG denies all media requests to ID those with concealed carry weapons permits.  Montana's Attorney General Tim Fox has taken a stand against revealing the identities of concealed weapon permit holders.  All 50 states now have laws permitting qualified individuals to own and carry concealed firearms.  But emotions have flared over identifying all those as a class.  A firestorm of controversy erupted last winter when a suburban New York newspaper, citing the public's right to know, published the names and addresses of all licensed handgun owners in Rockland and Westchester counties.

Gun Violence Is Down, But You Wouldn't Know From The News.  The rate of firearm homicides has plummeted over the past two decades, but the public doesn't seem to notice.  Could the agenda-driven media have something to do with that?

A verbal lynching by an anti-gun newspaper:
Aurora, Col. Sentinel Editor Wants NRA's 'Guilty Monsters ... Sent to Guantanamo Bay For All Eternity'.  Time was, several decades ago, that local and regional news in many parts of the country served as a bit of an antidote against the relentlessly biased national establishment press.  That certainly isn't the case in Aurora, Colorado, site of last year's horrible theater murders at the alleged hands of James Holmes.

MSNBC's Sage Advice on the Second Amendment.  Sometimes it's important to pay attention to what the people on MSNBC say, because it can actually give us insight on just what we should do for liberty.

After Gun Debate, Media Credibility Is Shot.  Normally, the people who cover the media industry try studiously to avoid mentioning the very obvious fact that America's elite journalists are overwhelmingly liberal and that one can discern this by reviewing their output. [...] In the case of the recent journalist meltdown over gun control, the bias was so overwhelming, even Politico's cautious media reporter Dylan Byers had to admit the obvious.

Gun debate triggered media bias.  If you thought President Obama was outraged after the Senate killed the plan to expand background checks on guns, you should have seen some members of the press.  Even by the standards of today's partisan media environment, the response has been noteworthy. [...] The decision by some members of the media to come down so firmly on one side of a policy debate has only served to reinforce conservatives' longstanding suspicions that the mainstream media has a deep-seated liberal bias.

Poll: Nobody Cares About Gun Control Except the Media.  Gallup released a poll Monday that asked Americans to list the most important problems currently facing the country.  Despite the fact that the media has been on a months-long, 24/7 crusade to convince DC lawmakers to restrict our Second Amendment civil rights, this propaganda push has failed miserably with the overall population:  Only 4% of Americans see gun control as a priority.

ABC Promotes Obama's 'Outrage' Over Gun Defeat, Features No Pro-Second Amendment Voices.  ABC on Wednesday and Thursday parroted Barack Obama's anger over the failure of his gun control bill, touting the President's rage over this "shameful day."  On World News and Good Morning America, reporter Jon Karl featured no pro-Second Amendment voices.

How the Media Blew the Gun Control Debate.  With the total and complete defeat of gun control legislation late Wednesday afternoon, the media learned something they had obviously forgotten since pushing Obama over the reelection finish line:  They do not run the country.  And from what we are seeing across the media landscape since the handing down of this defeat (which was followed by a full-blown presidential hissy fit), this realization has been quite a slap to the face.

The Top 50 Liberal Media Bias Examples.  [#48]  Guns Are Evil:  A typical line of bias against guns employed by the media is that of "expert" testimony.  An example might be the 2009 story ABC put out that aired the opinions of a rabid anti-gun group, but did not tell the viewers that those being presented as "experts" had a political agenda.

Two NY Times Columnists Embarrass Themselves on Guns in Sunday Review.  Two New York Times columnists embarrassed themselves over the weekend, betraying anti-gun ignorance in the paper's Sunday Review.  Frank Bruni went hunting for the first time (with the chef of a ritzy Manhattan restaurant), and remarked "what an unfair fight" hunting is, as if he was the first person to think that up.

A Reporter Explains Why Gun Coverage Is So Biased.  [Scroll down]  What a wonderful image!  A reporter who covers news stories involving firearms actually fires a gun, presumably for the first time in his or her life, and responds by screaming and dropping the pistol.  Priceless!

Comcast pulls local stores' commercials over gun policy.  Comcast is slowly but surely erasing guns from all its advertising, and shop owners in Georgia and New Jersey are the latest to be told their ads will be pulled if they don't take out all reference to weapons.  Ray Reynolds owns United Loan and Firearms, a pawn shop in Augusta.  He told the Augusta Chronicle on Monday [3/25/2013] he was notified last week that his ads would be pulled from the local Comcast cable station unless he took out all references to guns — including in his shop name.

Media Play Up Faulty Study Suggeting Link Between Guns, Death Rates.  Do fewer guns mean fewer firearm deaths?  If you believe the March 6th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association of Internal Medicine, the answer is "yes."  A study by Eric Fleegler and four other co-authors received massive national news coverage from USA Today to the television networks.  But the report is based on embarrassingly bad statistics that are rigged to get the result the authors wanted.

Chris Matthews: Support Gun Control or an American President Could Be Murdered.  In a closing commentary on Wednesday [2/27/2013], Hardball's Chris Matthews ranted that opposing gun control could lead to the assassination of a future American president or politician.  Matthews fumed that he supports new restrictions because "the next mass shooter could well emerge out of this pack" of the "politically nutty."

On CNN, Cause of Chicago Violence Is — You Guessed It — The GOP.  Chicago hasn't had a Republican mayor in over 80 years.  Democrats have controlled the Illinois governor's mansion and both houses of the legislature for more than a decade, with Democrats ruling the Illinois House for 28 of the last 30 years.  No matter, Chicago violence is the fault of Republicans.  We learned that this morning [2/22/2013] on CNN Newsroom [...]

The David Gregory police mystery.  The District of Columbia seems not to want the public to know what it did — if anything — while investigating NBC News' David Gregory for possession of an illegal 30-round magazine.  The police refuse to turn over the public documents in the case, and the city council is allowing them to stonewall.

When Crazed Shooters Can't Be Linked To The Tea Party, Media Displays Admirable Restraint.  Had either shooter [Dorner or Corkins] possessed even a tenuous link to a conservative group, a media-driven hysteria about the malevolent influence of right-wing broadcasters and commentators would be gripping the nation today.  Fortunately, when a crazed shooter's ideology is explicitly and demonstrably left-wing, the media displays admirable restraint about linking a gunman's politics to their acts of violence.

Alinsky Tactics Used Against Legal Gun Owners.  The gun control debate has taken a sinister turn with the publication by a Gannett owned newspaper of the names and addresses of people within the New York City area possessing a permit to own a handgun.  The newspaper states the information was compiled using public records, but why?  Why has the Gannett owned newspaper done this?  A journalist might answer that the public has a right to know, and I would ask him to point out that right in the Constitution.  The right to bear arms is clearly laid out there, but I don't recall seeing any right for the public to know anything.

Suspected Mass-Murderer's Manifesto Endorses Hillary, Obama, Gun Control, Elite Media.  Chris Dorner, the former-police officer suspected of being behind the murder rampage presently unfolding in Los Angeles, has apparently left behind a manifesto addressed to America that the media's already selectively reporting on to leave out the more inconvenient portions.  You see, there's no political upside for the media to reveal the politics of this suspected madman.

Study: ABC, CBS, NBC Slant 8 to 1 for Obama's Gun Control Crusade.  CBS was the most stridently anti-gun rights network.  By a whopping 22 to 1 ratio, CBS aired more stories that favored gun control (44) to those that supported gun rights (2), with 37 neutral pieces.  ABC aired almost six times as many stories that favored gun control (29) to those that favored gun rights, with 25 neutral stories.

A Case Study in Media Bias.  I made the mistake of taking in NBC's national news broadcast Thursday evening [1/31/2013], and it fell below even the usual low standards for network news bias and reportorial incompetence.  NBC essentially handed off their lead story to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

This story was scrubbed one day after it appeared.
How did the Seattle buyback turn into a flea market for guns?  The Seattle Police's gun buyback event yesterday turned into an ad hoc, unregulated flea market for weapons, with a Stinger missile launcher as the headliner.  The event, paid for by private donations, drew such a crowd that the buyback line stretched for hours.  That made the private gun buyers, hanging out at the edges, a more attractive option for some, including the guy who sold the non-functioning missile launcher to a private collector.  That's not explicitly illegal.

'Heckle' and Jive.  It started as an awkwardly written article by Ken Dixon, a reporter at the Connecticut Post of Bridgeport.  It became a fast-moving rumor and in some cases an outright lie propagated by national journalists.

The Feinstein "Assault Weapons" Ban: What's It All About?  Today [1/24/2013] Senator Dianne Feinstein unveiled her long-promised legislation to ban "assault weapons."  Since there is no such thing as an assault weapon, we will have to read the text of the law to see what it actually does.  So far, I haven't seen the text anywhere, but Feinstein's web site has a fairly detailed description of the bill, including a list of the 157 weapons that are specifically banned.  News coverage of Feinstein's proposal has been laughably bad.

Unbiased? 18 of 20 Top Newspapers Push Gun Control in Editorials.  At one time, newspapers were America's source for news and current events.  Today it's a completely different story.  While President Obama has declared a push to ban or limit types of guns, the nation's major newspapers are nearly unanimous in their support of gun control.  The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and other most-popular papers led the list.

Will the Gun-Grabbers Create a 'No Buy List' Using Your Prescription Records?  Is it completely absurd to envision an overreaching Department of Justice — via the Bureau of Justice Assistance — putting "at risk" Americans on a "no buy list" for guns, similar to the TSA's "no fly list"?  Shortly after the President's announcement at the White House on Wednesday [1/16/2013] Wolf Blitzer told Rep. Steve Toth (R-TX) on CNN, "Right now you can be on a "no fly list."  You're not allowed to board a plane and you can go to a gun show to buy a gun.  Is there a contradiction?"  Hypothetically, would you be on the "no buy list"?  Perhaps you would be asked, "Do you now, or have you ever taken Xanax or Ativan for anxiety?"  (Of course, there's no need to ask, the authorities already know).

Burglars steal two guns from home featured on weapons permit map — again.  Thieves ransacked a house that features on the gun map published by the Journal News, just days after another home on the list was also targeted.  Burglars broke into the house in New City, New York, on Wednesday [1/16/2013] and pried open two safes, before leaving with another one.

How Our Media Mislead on Guns.  Will the ignorance on firearms ever end?  If they insist on writing about guns, isn't it reasonable to expect that news organizations will employ someone, a reporter or editor, who knows something about them?

Democratic Lawmaker Joe Morrissey Brings AK-47 to Virginia State Capitol.  A Virginia state lawmaker raised eyebrows to say the least when he tried to make a point about assault weapons by bringing an AK-47 into the State Capitol!  The shocking video shows Democratic State Delegate Joe Morrissey speaking on the floor of the state House of Delegates when he pulled out an unloaded AK-47.  The move drew gasps from fellow lawmakers.

Virginia lawmaker's AK-47 sparks gun debate on House floor.  A Richmond-area lawmaker brandished an AK-47 on the floor of the Virginia House of Delegates on Thursday [1/17/2013] in a wild stunt aimed at rallying support for tougher gun laws.  Del. Joe Morrissey, D-Highland Springs, pulled the weapon out shortly after the day's session got underway, a time when legislators typically welcome school groups and other visitors in the chamber's gallery.

The Editor says...
Imagine the uproar and the coast-to-coast headlines if a Republican had done this.

James O'Keefe meets and films armed security at the homes of Journal-News journalists.  Veritas video reporter James O'Keefe has released a new video of his team posing as an anti-gun group promoting an initiative to journalists.  At each home, the group dubbed as "Citizens Against Senseless Violence" asks each homeowner if they are willing to put up a "Gun Free" sign in their yard.  O'Keefe primarily focuses his efforts on employees of the Journal-News — the New York newspaper that published a controversial map of registered gun owners online.

NRA President Schools Candy Crowley: Obama and Feinstein Are Driving Gun Sales Not Us!  CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday [1/13/2013] floated the typical media nonsense about how the National Rifle Association is ginning up fear to sell more guns in the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.  Fortunately for State of the Union viewers, NRA President David Keene was on the set to correctly point out, "The two people who are selling so-called assault rifles are Senator Feinstein and President Obama not us".

CBS Actually Covers Gun Self-Defense Case Promoted By NRA; ABC, NBC Punt.  On Friday's [1/11/2013] CBS This Morning, Bill Plante refreshingly spotlighted how firearms are used to protect the lives of ordinary Americans.  Plante noted how the National Rifle Association "Tweeted a story... about Melinda Herman, a Georgia woman who shot an intruder in self-defense as she waited with her two children in a closet....  She fired at the man multiple times with a .38 caliber handgun."  The two other Big Three morning shows failed to mention this story during their coverage of the current gun control debate.

The Real Gun-Control Consensus.  By this week, the elites were calling for a gun-control agenda unmatched in modern times.  The closing of the gun-show "loophole"?  Restrictions on large-capacity clips?  An "assault weapons" ban?  They want all that, plus a national gun database, and a background check for every gun sale, and similar checks for ammunition sales, and regulation of Internet transactions, and Michael Bloomberg crowned emperor.  (A position for which Mr. Bloomberg no doubt believes himself suited.)  The media have reported all this as rational, reasonable and doable.

Doing the research the New York Times won't do.  In Sunday's New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal claimed, as the title of her article put it, "More Guns = More Killing."  She based this on evidence that would never be permitted in any other context at the Times:  (1) anecdotal observations; and (2) bald assertions of an activist, blandly repeated with absolutely no independent fact-checking by the Times.

Americans Aren't As Trigger-Happy As Media Claim.  In the middle of a lengthy and uncharacteristically civil interview on Piers Morgan Tonight [1/8/2013], former Marine Joshua Boston said, "The American people aren't as gun-happy and trigger-happy as they're being painted out to be by the media.  They are smarter than that.  They know when to hold their fire.  They know when to fire."

Gun-Control Zealots Target Law-Abiding Citizens.  What public service is performed when newspapers and websites tell criminals where prison guards and retired cops live, and endanger the lives of people who've never had so much as a parking ticket?

School Shooting in Tennessee That National Media Did Not Report.  I am sure that no one outside of our immediate region has ever heard the story, because the only person who was shot — and killed — was the gunman.  These types of stories don't fit the narrative of those who want "gun-free zones" and so are ignored by the national media.

Rupert Murdoch Backs Obama's Gun Grab.  An honest account of media misinformation after the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy has to take into account Rupert Murdoch's tweet about the need to ban "automatic weapons," when none was used to kill any of the 26 people.  Can the chairman of News Corporation, the parent of Fox News, be this ignorant about the nature of gun laws and guns in America?  He asked, "When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons?"  He urged Obama to exercise "bold leadership" on the issue.

CNN Gives Anti-Gun Talking Point Help to Dem Congressman.  CNN's Victor Blackwell is big on helping.  He proved that on December 26 by giving Democrat Representative Jim Moran (Vir.) a little help with his anti-gun talking points during a broadcast of CNN's News Room.

Nat Geo Producer: John Wilkes Booth 'Could Be the Poster Child for the Tea Party'.  Executive Producer Erik Jendresen of National Geographic Channel's upcoming television movie "Killing Lincoln," said John Wilkes Booth "could be the poster child for the Tea Party." [...] Jendresen's remarks about Booth were in response to a reporter's question about how much history kids know today.

Vanity Fair: Second Amendment 'Must Be Removed from the Constitution'.  On January 2, Vanity Fair ran an all-out attack on the constitution, the 2nd Amendment, and common sense in a column by Kurt Eichenwald titled, "Let's Repeal the Second Amendment."  Eichenwald's approach consists of attacking the NRA, arguing that gun owners avoid discussing more gun control by saying they don't want to "politicize" shootings, and taking the standard progressive position that there wasn't really a right to keep and bear arms until Justice Antonin Scalia created one in recent Supreme Court decisions.

The David Gregory magazine story continues to unfold:
Laws, little people and the public interest.  The David Gregory ammo magazine saga continues.  Where does it stand now?  From the sound of things, NBC kept asking for permission for Gregory to wave the magazines around on the air until somebody said "yes," but that still didn't mean it would be legal.

Obama to David Gregory's Rescue.  So what gives?  Why did the President suddenly appear on Meet The Press?  Could it be to help Gregory out of his troubles?

CNN's O'Brien Urges Obama to "Track" People and Firearms.  The Washington Post story, "Media figures on left and right call for new gun-control laws," hailed Soledad O'Brien of CNN for taking a stand in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings.  Pretending to be an intellectual heavyweight on the subject, she declared on the channel that the problem in society is "access to semiautomatic weapons."  O'Brien's embarrassing outburst, which continued for several minutes during an interview with Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), is another indication of why CNN fails to attract many viewers.

New York newspaper faces backlash after publishing map of gun permit holders.  A local New York newspaper is drawing the ire of its readers after publishing an interactive map that shows the names and addresses of thousands of residents who have handgun permits.  The online map was published by The Journal News along with an article under the headline:  "The gun owner next door:  What you don't know about the weapons in your neighborhood."

If it's so dangerous to identify homes that are "gun-free" zones, why do we do it to our schools?
Revealing Gun-owners Names Reveals Truth.  A birdcage liner in my county of Westchester, NY, The Journal News, has made national headlines by releasing the addresses of county residents licensed to own a handgun.  The paper claims that in the wake of the Newtown shooting, citizens want to know more about the arsenals their neighbors may possess.  Of course, the rag's real motivation is obvious:  it wants to "out" firearms owners.

McFortress: An antigun newspaper avails itself of the Second Amendment.  Under normal circumstances, a company's lawful security arrangements would hardly be newsworthy.  But as we noted Monday, the Journal News provoked the bitter backlash that so frightened [Caryn] McBride by publishing a report in which it named residents of the two counties who have done exactly what the Journal News has now done:  lawfully availed themselves of their rights under the Second Amendment.

The Journal News is Armed and Dangerous.  A Clarkstown police report issued on December 28, 2012, confirmed that The Journal News has hired armed security guards from New City-based RGA Investigations and that they are manning the newspaper's Rockland County headquarters at 1 Crosfield Ave., West Nyack, through at least tomorrow, Wednesday, January 2, 2013.

'Journal News' hires armed security guards.  The Journal News of West Nyack, N.Y., has hired armed security guards to defend its offices after receiving a torrent of phone calls and emails responding to the paper's publication of the names and addresses of area residents with pistol permits.

Oh, the Irony.  The Journal News — the newspaper that mapped the home addresses of the law-abiding handgun owners in its area — has hired armed guards. [...] This action has the effect of putting the Journal News on its own map of gun owners.  Which will make it and its staff safer.  Any chance they'll learn anything from all this?

Ex-Burglars Say Newspaper's Gun Map Would've Made the Job Easier, Safer.  Reformed crooks say the New York newspaper that published a map of names and addresses of gun owners did a great service — to their old cronies in the burglary trade.  The information published online by the Journal-News, a daily paper serving the New York suburbs of Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties, could be highly useful to thieves in two ways, former burglars told FoxNews.com.

'Gun Map' Newspaper in Circulation Free Fall.  Buried at the bottom of a New York Times piece might be the real reason to explain why New York's Journal News did something as sensationally stupid as publishing the names and addresses of over 30,000 legal gun owners living in two New York counties.  In just five years, the Journal News' Monday through Friday circulation rate has plummeted almost 40%, "from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012."

Chickens come home; roost.
Burglars Hit Home of Gun Owner ID'd by Newspaper.  The home of a gun owner, whose address was published by a New York newspaper, has been burglarized and a state lawmaker said it appears the burglars may have used the newspaper's map to target the residence.  "Luckily the gun was locked up and no one was hurt," Sen. Greg Ball said.  The residence in White Plains, was identified in an interactive map that identified the names and addresses individuals who have gun permits.  It was published by The Journal News — a Gannett Co. newspaper.

White Plains home on handgun permit database burglarized.  A White Plains home that is listed on a publicized handgun permit database was burglarized last night.  Officials say the target of the burglary was the homeowner's gun case.

Journal News gun permit map used by burglars to target White Plains home?  A White Plains residence pinpointed on a controversial handgun permit database was burglarized Saturday [1/12/2013], and the burglars' target was the homeowner's gun safe.

Home Burglary Tied to Journal News' Gun Map Reported.  On Jan 13, New York State senator Gregory Ball announced that a burglary had been reported which appears to be a direct result of the Journal News' gun-owner-name-dump.  According to Sen. Ball's announcement, the burglar allegedly "used the Journal News' interactive gun map to target a home included on the map."

Gun-Outing Newspaper Removes Names, Addresses from Map.  Citing public safety issues, as late as last Tuesday [1/15/2013] a group of 50 current and former law enforcement officials gathered to demand that the newspaper remove the names from public view.  As soon as the map became an issue, legislators began efforts to change the state's laws to make it illegal to out gun owner's names.

NBC's Gregory Mocks NRA Security Guard Idea But Sends Own Kids to Guarded School.  On NBC's Meet The Press over the weekend, David Gregory was quite confrontational with the Vice President of the National Rifle Association over the organization's idea of putting armed security guards in every school in America.  But even as Gregory mocked the NRA for the idea, he seems to see nothing wrong with sending his own kids to a school that has armed security guards each school day.

Gregory on MTP: Likely Broke DC Law.  Two blog posts today should shred the credibility of Meet the Press's David Gregory in making arguments for gun control and against appropriate armed staff or security personnel at schools — or they would, if journalists had the least bit of interest in exposing lawbreaking and hyprocritical behavior by their professional colleagues.

David Gregory presses NRA's Wayne LaPierre, may have violated DC law.  On Sunday's broadcast of NBC's "Meet the Press," moderator David Gregory took a very aggressive posture in his exclusive interview with NRA executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre.  After a series of LaPierre's answers appeared to frustrate him, Gregory lashed out at LaPierre and held up a high-capacity ammunition magazine, leading to a back-and-forth between Gregory and LaPierre.

DC Police Investigating NBC's Gregory for Brandishing Illegal Magazine.  In a discussion about gun control, host David Gregory brandished a 30-round magazine purportedly for an AR-15 or similar "assault rifle."  The discussion took place on December 23, during the broadcast of NBC's Sunday morning political talk show.  Washington D.C.'s gun laws, however, state that even possessing such a device is a violation.  Meet the Press is filmed at NBC's D.C. studios.

NBC Reportedly Requested High-Capacity Clip For Meet The Press, Was Denied By Police.  NBC News asked Washington D.C. police for a high-capacity magazine clip to use on Meet The Press, but was denied, according to a report by Washington Post.  The information comes amid an investigation into host David Gregory's use of a 30-round magazine on the show.

Thank You, David Gregory.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then your stunt is worth a thousand op-eds.  In less than one minute of screen time, you demonstrated several things:  First, even "banned" magazines are ridiculously easy to acquire.  How long did it take your producers to find that magazine?  Five minutes?  Ten minutes?  There are millions upon millions of these cheap and easy-to-manufacture items in circulation, and "banning" them will have exactly the effects you so brilliantly demonstrated on national television.

D.C. AG's Office Investigating NBC's Gregory Over Alleged Gun Law Violation.  The decision over whether or not to charge NBC's David Gregory for allegedly breaking Washington D.C.'s strict gun-banning laws on a December 23 broadcast of Meet the Press is now in the hands of the D.C. Attorney General, authorities reported Tuesday [1/8/2013].

NBC's Gregory won't be charged for displaying ammunition clip on TV.  D.C. attorney general Irvin B. Nathan announced his decision Friday afternoon [1/11/2014] by releasing a letter to an attorney for NBC.  Nathan wrote that though the device Gregory held up "meets the definition" of the criminal statute, he wrote that prosecution "would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust."

The Editor says...
First of all, it could be argued that none of DC's gun control laws promote public safety.  All they do is prevent law abiding citizens from defending themselves.  Second, does the DC-AG pick and choose which laws to enforce?  Third, what if Wayne LaPierre had brought in such a prop?  Would he skate, too?  Not likely.

David Gregory gets off scot free.  The attorney general for the District of Columbia, Irvin Nathan, announced Friday that he will not press charges against NBC News' David Gregory nor any employee of the broadcast network for violating the city's gun laws.  Violation of the city's firearms laws carry a maximum $1,000 fine and one year in jail.

Despite 'Feeble And Unsatisfactory' Defense By NBC, D.C. Prosecutor Clears David Gregory.  The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) says that, "despite the clarity of the violation of this important law," and NBC's "feeble and unsatisfactory" attempts to exonerate Gregory, they have declined to prosecute the violation.

Friday night document dump: Gun criminal David Gregory is above the law.  I wonder how many people who've been arrested for violating DC's gun laws — which the cops didn't even bother to do with Gregory — have gotten away with it because they don't have a criminal record and they express the correct opinions?  Does that particular law say anything about whether or not you're a threat to public safety?  Or does it say you're not allowed to possess a certain object?  Either you possess it or you don't.  Gregory did.  It was on TV and everything.  He made sure people saw him wave an illegal ammunition magazine in Wayne LaPierre's face.

What an amazing coincidence.
David Gregory's Wife Acted in Play with DC Attorney General.  There may have been a more personal factor in Washington, D.C. Attorney General Irv Nathan's decision to let NBC's David Gregory off the hook Friday than the "prosecutorial discretion" he claimed he was exercising by declining to prosecute Gregory for alleged possession of a high-capacity gun magazine.

David Gregory skates past prosecution.  Few will be surprised by the news that David Gregory will not be prosecuted for possessing a high-capacity magazine during his appearance on "Meet the Press."  The decision was made by District of Columbia Attorney General Irvin Nathan, who turns out to be a social acquaintance of Gregory and his wife.

Democrat Activists in the Press Corps Slam NRA During Press Conference.  For a week following the tragic massacre in Newtown, CT, many in the mainstream media called on the National Rifle Association to speak up.  A week later, the NRA did speak up, and many in the mainstream media took to Twitter to attack what the group was saying.

MSNBC's 'Rossen Reports': More Lying About Guns.  [Scroll down]  In short:  the report lied about what the weapon was, and then dishonestly portrayed it as being modified into something supposedly designed for explicitly criminal behavior.  This level of purposeful deception by a journalist is on par with fabricating quotes or plagiarism.  It is an offense that should lead to a suspension or termination.

'Assault' — The Democrat-Media Complex Strikes Again.  For unbridled bias, ignorance and animus, this Reuters story on firearms has to be read to believed.  Let's start with the headline:  Gun enthusiasts pack shows to buy assault weapons  In case you're slow on the uptake, the story contains no fewer than thirteen uses of the word "assault," all of them used incorrectly.  The idea is to get the reader to think that enraged gun nuts all across America are lining up to buy machine guns in order to "assault" a particular target of their ire.

Gregory Mocks LaPierre for Proposing Armed Guards, but Sends Kids to High-Security School.  David Gregory mocked the NRA's Wayne LaPierre for proposing that armed guards be at every school in America.  But the NBC host seems to have no problem with armed guards protecting his kids everyday where they attend school in Washington, D.C.

Media Ignore Shootings in Chicago.  My guess is that the media's lack of interest in Chicago's ongoing murder spree has a lot to do with the lack of political upside in reporting on the story.  Because what's happening in Chicago can't in any way be blamed on Republicans, conservative ideas, or a lack of left-wing ideas, the media would prefer to pretend the murders aren't happening.  You see, the media can't blame the murders on a lack of gun control, because Chicago has the toughest gun control laws in the country.

NBC News to Obama: How to Beat 2nd Amendment Advocates.  As we learned during the election, Barack Obama can always count on NBC News to help him navigate his way to whatever victory he seeks.  This morning [12/17/2012], NBC's First Read — written by Chuck Todd and others — is all within the context of winning the argument over the passage of laws that would restrict the law-abiding from purchasing the ability to defend themselves — in other words, having access to guns.

Media myths on 'assault weapons' and 'semiautomatic firearms'.  If gun-control advocates and our media want to have a conversation about government restrictions on gun ownership, I think that's fine.  Debating more issues, rather than fewer, is probably good for our politics.  But the conversation about guns needs to be a bit more factually precise.  Today's New York Times story on the AR-15 has a lot of good information and aims to be balanced, but the story still manages to perpetuate many of the most stubborn myths about rifles.

Guns save lives.  You know what the mainstream media think about guns and our freedom to carry them.  Pierre Thomas of ABC:  "When someone gets angry or when they snap, they are going to be able to have access to weapons."  Chris Matthews of MSNBC:  "I wonder if in a free society violence is always going to be a part of it if guns are available."  Keith Olbermann, who usually can't be topped for absurdity:  "Organizations like the NRA ... are trying to increase deaths by gun in this country."

Virtually Unreported: CCW Holder Likely Prevented Larger Clackamas Mall Death Toll.  If certain aspects of stories relating to an incident of gun violence don't fit the template, they usually doesn't get reported at all.  But if such things somehow get some local exposure, they rarely escape into the broader national news environment.

NYT Opinion Editor Andrew Rosenthal Contradicts Himself Within Hours on Politicizing Gun Deaths.  Andrew Rosenthal, the driving force behind the perpetually hyperventilating and self-contradicting editorials that fill up space in the New York Times's opinion pages has now proven that he can hyperventilate and contradict himself in real-time.

Sanitizing Adam Lanza.  Is the media so estranged from commonplace reality that they automatically reach for the cheapest, most sentimental interpretation of an event as a matter of instinct?  Or is it yet another case of ideological subterfuge, an effort to deny the shooter any form of agency, instead transferring responsibility to the demonic weapon he used?

Bob Costas Exploits NFL Murder/Suicide to Take Our Guns.  Last night [12/2/2012] during NBC's NFL telecast, Bob Costas did something the NFL has always been very good about avoiding — inserting politics into what Americans of all political stripes see as one of the few remaining escapes from the divisive partisanship that seems to infect everything these days.  Taking advantage of a captive halftime audience, Costas suckered [sic] punched millions with a left-wing preach about gun control.

George Stephanopoulos Touts Michael Bloomberg's Anti-Gun Truck.  Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday [2/16/2011] conducted a softball interview with Michael Bloomberg, touting his new gun control campaign and never once calling the New York mayor a liberal.

CNN Reports 8 Shot in NYC, Overlooks 19 Shot in Chicago.  This means Chicago is at approximately 37 shooting deaths for the month of August alone.  And the city is still on track for 500 gun related deaths this calendar year.  Is there any chance CNN might see a pattern here?  Might they not recognize that the Chicago example utterly destroys the claim that gun control saves lives?

Raleigh, N.C. CBS Affiliate Station WRAL Publishes Searchable Database of Concealed Carry Licensees.  WRAL, the CBS affiliate in Raleigh, N.C., recently published a searchable database of concealed carry licensees within the "WRAL viewing area [...] ."  Searches do not turn up names or street numbers, but they do give a number of permits issued to residents on that street.

Two Aurora Shootings: One Widely Known; the Other Ignored.  On April 22 of this year a convicted felon, just out of jail, went to an Aurora, Colorado, church and shot and killed a member of the congregation before being killed himself by a congregant carrying a gun. [...] Because the perpetrator was able to claim only one life before being killed himself by someone carrying a gun and acting in self-defense, it garnered relatively little publicity.

The Media Botches Aurora.  Unfortunately, the shooting in Aurora, Colo., has once again driven the subject of guns into the media spotlight.  Here are five additional ways that journalists can avoid sounding stupid when they write about guns in the wake of tragic events.

ABC News' reporting on the Aurora shooting is even worse than we thought.  Apparently this story isn't horrible enough already.  The people we used to count on to tell us the news keep doing [everything they can] to make it even worse.

A sneaky way to control guns.  Gun-control advocates and the Obama administration are rushing to complete negotiations in New York on a proposed international agreement called the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.  They hope to finish the drafting within weeks, perhaps having a document ready for signature so that President Obama could press a lame-duck Senate to ratify it after our Nov. 6 elections.  Because these UNATT negotiations had long escaped serious media attention, many Americans are only now learning about their disturbing direction.

MSNBC Politicizes Dark Knight Shooting With Long Gun Control Segment.  MSNBC's NOW with Alex Wagner dove into the contentious issue of gun control on Friday [7/20/2012] after a gunman engaged in a horrific mass shooting in Colorado, which claimed the lives of at least 13 people* and wounded scores more.  While many in the world of political commentary have held their tongues about their personal policy preferences after this attack, given that so many details are as yet unknown, Wagner's panel guests did not exercise that level of caution.  MSNBC's panel guests, including former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell who has been particularly vocal in his support of gun control laws, did not provide a counter balance for many of their pro-gun control claims.
*Editor's note:  At the time this article was posted, the death toll was only twelve.  Originally it was reported to be 14, but the number was quickly revised.

MSNBC's 'Rossen Reports': More Lying About Guns.  [Scroll down]  In short:  the report lied about what the weapon was, and then dishonestly portrayed it as being modified into something supposedly designed for explicitly criminal behavior.  This level of purposeful deception by a journalist is on par with fabricating quotes or plagiarism.  It is an offense that should lead to a suspension or termination.

Chicks with Guns.  Howard Chua-Eoan, News Director of TIME and TIME.com, is shocked that 20 million American women own guns.  What a sheltered life the man must lead, innocent as he must be of American history:  Has he never heard of Annie Oakley, who was not the only frontierswoman proficient in the handling of arms?

Media Silence Is Deafening About Important Gun News.  Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C. ... But Armageddon never happened.  Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn't rise after the bans were eliminated — they plummeted.  They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.

More guns, fewer murders.  [John] Lott points out liberal media hypocrisy.  ["]One can only imagine the coverage if crime rates had risen.  Not surprisingly, the national media have been completely silent about this news.["] Deep — maybe not so deep — in their hearts the national media might be disappointed at this good news, disproving their thesis which is why they didn't highlight it.

Gun Owners Have a Right to Privacy.  If you own a gun in Illinois, take precautions.  The state attorney general, Lisa Madigan, wants to release the names of guns owners in response to an Associated Press request.  Publication of that list would tell the criminal class where the guns are, which could be useful to two different sorts of lawbreakers:  gun thieves who want to know where the guns are and burglars who want to know where they are not.

The "War on Cops" That Isn't.  Despite what you may have read, it's safer to be a police officer today than it has been in 35 years.

Cooking the Gun Homicide Numbers at the NYT.  In his New York Times column "Obama's Gun Play," Charles M. Blow lays out a familiar but inaccurate talking point:  we need increased gun control laws because the United States is the murder capital of the planet. ... New York Times readers, however, ought to hesitate before scurrying to speed-dial their Congress reptiles and demand an end to this preventable epidemic of gun ownership.  To begin with, that repeated phrase "9 out of 10" has a euphonious ring, but Blow's data is simply inaccurate.  I was unable to find any U.S. homicide statistics in the source cited, the United Nations Small Arms Survey, which for the most part discusses the proliferation of guns in places like Timor and Yemen.

The Bias Against Guns:  The certainties we can expect are life, death, weather patterns ... and the old media always exploiting a tragedy involving a firearm into a call for gun control.  To wit, two days after the Tucson tragedy, The Washington Post ran an editorial with this headline:  "Gun control:  It's not a political impossibility."

More about the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

MSNBC Shocker:  Firearms Deaths Fall As Gun Restrictions Ease.  What's the likelihood of an EXTREMELY liberal media outlet publishing an article about firearm related homicides declining while permits to carry concealed weapons increase?  About as likely as Keith Olbermann saying something nice about Sarah Palin, right?

False reports about guns.  Countless newspapers and television networks — from CBS to MSNBC — have misreported that conservative protesters are threatening President Obama with guns at public events.  It hasn't happened.

The Gunman and the Gun Ban.  Gun control groups deliberately foster confusion between "assault weapons," an arbitrary category based mainly on appearances, and machine guns, which are already strictly regulated under federal law.  The confusion was apparent in news coverage of [Michael] McLendon's shooting spree, which erroneously called his guns "automatic weapons" and "high-powered assault rifles."

National Geographic TV Takes Aim At Your Guns.  National Geographic Channel ran a show last night [11/16/2008] entitled, "Guns In America."  According to the program, there are millions of misguided gun owners across the nation.  Why?  Because your guns are supposedly more likely to harm you than to help you in an emergency.

The Right to Self-Defense Affirmed.  "Repeal the Second Amendment," The Chicago Tribune editorialized.  "The Supreme Court on Thursday all but ensured that even more Americans will die," said The New York Times.  "[T]he Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms only in relation to service in a state militia." added The Washington Post.

Bill of Rights or Bill of Goods?  Reuters has their number.  "Although an individual now has a constitutional right to own guns, that new right is not unlimited, wrote [Justice Antonin] Scalia, a hunter," the news service reports today.  Justice Stevens is 88, and he is generally considered old.  If this right really dated back 217 years, Reuters could not describe it as new.

Medford Newspaper Gets CHL List.  The Medford Mail Tribune, a newspaper which has repeatedly editorialized against self defense for public employees, has won a court case .pdf to get the names, addresses and occupations of all concealed handgun license holders in Jackson County.  The newspaper demanded this information as part of series of articles attacking Medford teacher Shirley Katz.

Heston's America:  The headlines announcing Charlton Heston's death peg him as a actor who was a gun activist.  He might not have been a real-life Moses, but he was much more than the media give him credit for.

Morning Shows Hit Snooze Button on Court Overturning San Fran Gun Ban.  None of the April 11 editions of the network morning shows:  ABC's "Good Morning America," CBS's "The Early Show," and NBC's "Today," noted the April 10 unanimous ruling of the California Supreme Court striking down a San Francisco handgun ban.

"News you can use" — to get yourself killed...
To Deter Home Invasion Killers, GMA Advises Wind Chimes, Not a Gun.  While co-host Chris Cuomo suggested planting cactus plants in your windowsill and hanging wind chimes, he ignored a more obvious option with a better chance of protecting your family against psychotic felons who've done hard prison time whom wind chimes are unlikely to deter:  purchasing a gun.

Media Spins Virginia Tech Tragedy for Gun Control.  Even a national tragedy like the shooting massacre on the campus of Virginia Tech will not delay the New York Times and congressional gun-control advocates in their quest to push their liberal agenda.  In the New York Times lead editorial today, which was likely written mere hours after the nation's worst gun rampage in history and before the bodies had cooled, the gray lady is calling for more gun control.

Tancredo Spokesman Disputes 'Deadliest Massacre' Claims.  The shooting spree at Virginia Tech is being reported as the "deadliest massacre in U.S. history" or the "deadliest massacre on a U.S. campus."  The office of Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) would respectfully like to offer a correction.  In fact, said Tancredo spokesman Carlos Espinosa, the worst school rampage occurred when an anti-tax zealot blew up a school in Bath, Mich., in 1927, killing around 40 children and a handful of adults, including himself.  (Accounts of the death toll vary, but all reported a number larger than 33.)

How to Recognize a Skunk:  Reading the morning paper, you come across a wire-service article on a subject you know well — guns.  The article is filled with biased language ("gun violence," "spraying bullets" "million moms") and statistics that are either made up or cooked from highly unscientific methodology ("12 students killed by guns every day,"  "43 times more likely to be killed by a gun in your own home").  How do we tell truth from fiction, or recognize when half-truths and twisted language are being used to manipulate us, without spending our lives tracking down every obscure databit or factoid behind every news story?

Gun-Control Activists Resurrect Agenda.  In an apparent attempt to lull gun owners into a false sense of political security, some media personnel allege that gun owner fundraising efforts are ludicrous.  They imply that gun rights groups do not need to raise funds because there no longer is a threat to the rights of gun owners.  These writers obviously would like to drive a wedge between the organizations and their supporters, thus undercutting gun owners' political strength.

Handgun owners irate over having names published online.  Dozens of readers have taken issue with The Journal News over its decision to run a list of pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties as part of a wider investigative article.  The names of more than 30,000 licensed handgun owners were posted online as part of "Falling Through the Cracks," the paper's Dec. 10 report that found that thousands of registered handguns were unaccounted for because there is no system to secure the weapons of permit holders who die.

False reports about guns.  Countless newspapers and television networks — from CBS to MSNBC — have misreported that conservative protesters are threatening President Obama with guns at public events.  It hasn't happened.

The First Amendment vs the Second Amendment:
Should gun data lists be muzzled?  At 9:15 last Sunday morning, just a few hours after The Roanoke Times was dropped on doorsteps and shoved into paper boxes across the region, Scot Shippee fired the first shot in what would become the newspaper's biggest Internet controversy.  In an online discussion forum, Shippee blasted the paper for posting on its Web site a database that included the names and addresses of everyone in Virginia licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

Gun Owners Irked By Newspaper Database Ploy.  Virginia handgun owners are fired up over the publication of their names and addresses in a database posted online by a state newspaper.  The database of every Virginia resident who holds a state-issued permit to carry a concealed handgun was posted on the Roanoke Times' website Sunday to accompany a column in the paper by Times editorial writer Christian Trejbal.

This month's Non-Compos Mentis Award winner.  After obtaining a list of all 135,789 Virginians who are permitted to carry a concealed weapon, [Christian] Trejbal and his employer [the Roanoke Times] posted them in a searchable online database. … Trejbal unintentionally created a "do not mess with" list of Virginians, but what about all the folks who are not on that list?

The Witch Hunt Against Gun Owners:  The Roanoke Times showed reckless disregard for the safety of the license holders and reckless disregard for accuracy.  In his column, Trejbal admitted that he knew some of the information he had obtained was inaccurate — but published it anyway.

Here is an example of biased coverage:
U.S. Guns Arming Mexican Drug Gangs; Second Amendment to Blame?  U.S. gun stores and gun shows are the source of more than 90 percent of the weapons being used by Mexico's ruthless drug cartels, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials.

The Editor says...
My rebuttal would carry the title, "ABC News Operates at a Profit — First Amendment to Blame?"  Very simply, the Constitution cannot be "blamed" for crimes committed by free people.

Terrorism as an Excuse:  Another CBS Campaign.  The link to terrorism supposedly provides a new possible reason to ban 50-caliber rifles.  But the decision to demonize these particular guns and not say .475-caliber hunting rifles is completely arbitrary.  The difference in width of these bullets is a trivial .025 inches.  What's next?  Banning .45-caliber pistols?  Indeed the whole strategy is to gradually reduce the type of guns that people can own.

It's the anti-gun people who are nuts.  This year's Pittsburgh NRA convention set an attendance record.  Over the course of the convention's weekend-long run, more than 61,000 people visited the booths, workshops and meetings.  And, unlike at recent rallies in American cities "celebrating" sports teams' victories, there wasn't a single act of violence, not a single arrest, no wild drinking or drug-induced demonstrations. ... Come to think of it, I suppose that's precisely why the convention generated so little attention from the so-called mainstream media.

Most "spiked" stories of 2003.  Virtually ignored by the news media, a comprehensive review of America's gun control laws, conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found no proof whatsoever that gun laws - including waiting periods and bans on certain weapons - reduce gun-related violence.

The Media's Militia Hate-Fest:  You've got to hand it to those braniacs in the media.  Almost before the blast of the Olympic bombing stopped ringing in our ears, they knew whodunnit.  Actually, it was a simple deduction for them.  The person who phoned in the warning had an American, white-sounding voice; therefore it was (ominous music, please) the militia!  Now, now, don't pay any attention to the talk about this loner security guard with the hero complex.  The media had its men long ago.

"Assault Weapons" Bait-and-Switch:  This week, CNN had to air several corrections... It turned out that the undamaged brick target had never even been fired on — yet another journalistic fib by America's "most trusted news network."

The autobiography of Sarah Brady:  Sarah Brady is appearing now on talk shows, promoting her book in the company of sympathetic hosts.  You can bet that pro-gun authors would not be accorded the same privilege and you can be certain that she will not notice the double standard.  Like most autobiographies, "A Good Fight" portrays the author in a favorable light and presents her political views in a one-sided way.

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2017 by Andrew K. Dart

Media Spike Stories of Self-Defense:  The mainstream media bias against gun owners may have eased a bit, but there is still a strong aversion to reporting the benefits of defensive firearms in the hands of citizens.

Author Accuses Media of Intentional Bias Against Guns.  The author of the most comprehensive and controversial research on civilian use of firearms against criminals defended his latest work in Washington on Monday [5/20/2003].

Guns Save Lives:  You would think that a man who saved three people's lives, at considerable risk to his own, would be recognized as a hero.  But his story would be politically incorrect, so it has received virtually no media attention and his name remains unknown.

Media bias regarding gun control:  Today, the right to own a gun is under assault like never before.  Every time a firearm is used in a high-profile crime, calls for stricter gun regulation - even outright prohibition - are pounded into us by a press that has taken sides.  In fact, when it comes to guns, journalists have clearly made up their minds.  According to a recent study, television news stories calling for stricter gun laws outnumbered newscasts opposing such laws by a ratio of ten to one.  In other words, we are hearing only one side of the story.

When It's Guns, Media Miss Big Part Of Picture:  When more than one person gets killed, the crimes get not only national but international news coverage.  On the other hand, when was the last time that you heard the national evening news reporting about a citizen using a gun to save lives?  Few people realize that people use guns defensively to stop about 2 million crimes a year, according to national surveys.

Media Gets Thumbs Down From Panel On Firearms Coverage:  The mainstream media gets a failing grade when it comes to covering firearms and Second Amendment issues, according to a panel discussion of media coverage at the National Rifle Association convention.

The Media That Couldn't Shoot Straight:  How a Hand Gun Saved Lives.  In the public school shootings where citizens with guns have stopped attacks, rarely do more than 1 percent of the news stories mention that citizens with guns stopped the attacks.

Media Ignore Fact That Gun Owners Stopped School Shooter:  Two of the three Virginia law students who overpowered a gunman in a fatal school shooting were armed and used their weapons to disarm the shooter.  Yet of the 280 stories written about the shooting, a mere four mentioned the fact that the heroic students were armed and used their guns to halt the rampage.  That's according to Dr. John Lott, a resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute and the author of the widely acclaimed book "More Guns, Less Crime."

Hollywood Westerns, Guns, and Property Rights:  The death of the western movie has matched the replacement of courage in this culture — and the replacement of justice.  The masters of the media prefer disarmed citizens.

Shooting blind:  Press coverage of the "assault weapon" controversy suggests that most jounalists know very little about guns and are not interested in learning.

The gun show bill is not what they sayCongress, the media and many Americans are paying more attention to gun shows these days.  Noted gun law author Alan Korwin digs deep into the legislation and notes that it's very likely the establishment media are not giving you the full, complete and accurate picture of how changing gun shows could make a big change in your 2nd Amendment rights.

Bill Would Close Gun Law Holes:  Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced legislation Tuesday [7/30/2002] to close major gaps in the federal firearms background check system that in a 30-month period allowed some 10,000 felons and others prohibited from gun ownership to obtain weapons.  McCain said the hole is the "faulty records of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS)."

 Editor's Note:   What's this?  A government system with faulty records?  Will anyone remember this when the National ID Card debate gets underway?

Putting School Violence Into Perspective:  According to the National School Safety Center exactly six students have been murdered, committed suicide, or suffered weapons-related violent death in the United States in the 2000-2001 school year.  The false perception of rampant school violence in American schools is fueled by media outlets that instinctively are drawn to extremes.

Gun Rights in the Crosshairs:  "Of all matters of public policy, the issue of private ownership of guns is one where many journalists don't even pretend to be objective. Mention firearms, the Second Amendment or, heaven forbid, the NRA, and flecks of rabid foam seem to seep from the newsprint."

Truth in Crime Reporting:  The New York Times is being accused by research scholar John R. Lott Jr. of using inaccurate data in a recent major series published by the newspaper about rampage killings.

U.S. Press Ignores Israeli Hero:  Another hero in the War on Terror has been ignored.  He is 46-year-old Israeli shoe salesman William Hazan. ... His name should be on every American's lips.

Major Networks Refuse Guns-Pilots Ad:  Major media networks have refused to air a 60 second commercial calling for President Bush, the FAA, and the airlines to arm commercial pilots.

The End of the Million Moms:  Last Mother's Day, the Democrats hijacked an American family holiday by organizing the Million Mom March (MMM).  Some media reports claimed that 750,000 "marchers" showed up (though the actual attendance was less than 100,000).  This year, they tried again.  The turnout was less than 200.

The Bias Against Handguns:  Does domestic gun ownership pose a more serious threat to Americans than foreign terrorism?  That's what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof seems to be saying in a recent article.  Alarmed by reports of a surge in gun sales after September 11, Kristof cites familiar statistics on the perils of guns.

Media bias in coverage of gun control:  The Press Evaluates the Popular Culture:  A comparison of two opinion polls released in 1979 reveals that while small newspapers may favor gun rights, "newspapers of record" and wire services undoubtedly boost gun control.

Loaded Coverage:  When guns are used to save lives, why do the mainstream media ignore the story?

Outgunned:  How the Network News Media Are Spinning the Gun Control Debate:  This detailed study finds that mainstream American news sources are overwhelmingly biased against guns and in favor of restrictions on the right to bear arms.

Pollster Focuses on Media's Anti-Gun Bias A leading opinion pollster said Sunday she believes the national media's anti-gun bias, as reflected in much of the reporting about gun crimes and gun issues, stems from the fact that most reporters and anchors don't know much about guns.

Emotive Policy-making:  We live in an age of paradox.  Media saturation following events like the murders at Columbine High School makes it appear that violence surrounds us.  Yet the crime rate has been falling and school shootings remain extremely rare.  In contrast, the serious violence that pervades some inner-city schools never makes the news.

N.Y. Times Tries to Manipulate Public Opinion on Arming Pilots:  Once again the New York Times is using its news pages to manipulate public opinion – this time using a story about arming pilots in a blatantly obvious attempt to turn Americans against letting pilots have the right to carry guns against hijackers.

New York Times Continues Spin Against Arming Pilots:  The Times has found a reason to oppose the bill arming airline pilots.  It would upset trial lawyers!



Special subsection about Vice-President Cheney's hunting accident:

This incident showed the country a great deal about news media priorities, sensationalism and unmitigated political bias.

The people in the Washington news media are not accustomed to being ignored.  They can't stand being left in the dark, even for a few hours, when something happens that falls into the scope of their supposed "right to know".  They also don't understand how responsible adults can spend the day using shotguns to kill birds as a means of social interaction.  That's why this story raised such a furor in the media, and why the media insists on passing the furor on to you.

Why weren't we informed?  Isn't it obvious?  One particularly eager journalist asked, "Under Texas law, is this kind of accidental shooting a possible criminal offense?"  The transcript does not indicate whether he was rubbing his hands together at the time.

Why did Cheney go to the Fox network?  This incident became a perfect storm for all that the mainstream media dislikes about the Bush administration — tax cuts, the war, his alleged secrecy, tax cuts, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, the Katrina response, tax cuts, Justices Alito and Roberts, his home state of Texas (where they have the death penalty), tax cuts, his walk, his pronunciation of the word "nuclear," and tax cuts.

Cast of Characters:  Part IV.  Remember how the media carried on for weeks about Vice President Cheney's hunting accident?  How a Time magazine reporter had a temper tantrum at a White House press briefing because the news wasn't released soon enough — as if this hunting accident had any significance for the nation, beyond those in the media who were frustrated at being deprived of a Sunday talk show feeding frenzy?

Old media shame:  I see the vice president as an honorable, forthright gentleman who places the nation's best interests above his own.  Others prefer to believe he would sell out his own mother to line his pockets with oil-slicked greenbacks.  The Old Media, of course, fall into the latter category.

Spoiled brat media:  The accidental shooting of Harry Whittington, while he was on a hunting trip with Dick Cheney, has nothing to do with government policy or the Vice President's official duties but the mainstream media have gone ballistic over it nevertheless.

The buckshot heard round the world.  Vice President Cheney shot a friend of his — Harry Whittington — with buckshot in a bird hunting accident.  While his friend was bleeding on the ground, Cheney failed to call the Washington press corps first.  Instead he was worried about Harry Whittington bleeding on the ground and taking care of him, and then contacting Harry's wife and adult kids before the story got out on the wire service.

[Attention gun-hating news writers:  It was BIRD shot.  Buckshot would have killed the old man.]

The media's Cheney hunt.  What really shocked people was the way our Cheney-hating press corps went crazy with it.  The Big Three networks aired 34 stories in the first 48 hours of evening and morning newscasts.  They treated this not as a mishap, and then a punchline, but as a brewing national scandal.

A Hunter's Take on Cheney's Mistake.  Hey hysterical media chum suckers, if you want to obsess about a gun (or guns) in South Texas, why don't you travel a little further southwest from Corpus Christi to Laredo where U.S. authorities just snatched ready-to-detonate IEDs, materials for making 33 more, military style grenades, 26 grenade triggers, large quantities of AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles, 1280 rounds of ammo, silencers, machine gun assembly kits, 300 primers, bullet proof vests, police scanners, sniper scopes, narcotics and cash from Mexican dope dealers?

Killer Cheney.  This commentator rations himself to only one prediction every 15 years.  Mine now is that there is going to be a devastating backlash in the months and years ahead in the matter of Cheney and the quail shoot.

News magazines overdo Cheney-gate.  Texas lawyer Harry Whittington getting peppered by Cheney was a cover story in both magazines.  White House lawyer Vince Foster shooting himself dead in 1993 was not.



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Updated January 22, 2024.

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