Category: Media

Defeat the Lies of Gun Control with Facts

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace went on a rant that targeted conservative media and the Second Amendment. It’s one that Second Amendment supporters should pay some heed to, even though Wallace these days is little more than a Beltway version of Regina George.

Wallace may be a NeverTrump “mean girl” these days, but she also was – at least putatively – a one-time Second Amendment supporter (and she worked for a President who appointed two of the five justices in the Heller majority). She also was a White House communications director, and as much as we may want to dismiss her, dummies don’t become White House communications directors. People who show loyalty and competence usually get that job.

This is why her claim that America has a gun crisis needs to be taken on, forcefully. Like David Frum’s lie about responsible gun ownership and the phony bologna claims about the origins of the Second Amendment from Carol Anderson (via the ACLU), we must push back. These lies are not small potatoes.

How do we fight back? With the facts.

Some of these facts come from looking over the latest FBI stats. In 2020, a total of 455 homicides were carried out with rifles, with another 203 carried out by shotguns. To put that into perspective, “personal weapons” (hands, fists, feet, etc.) killed 662 people or more than rifles and shotguns of all types combined. Handguns and “firearms, type not stated” were used in 8,209 and 4,863 homicides, respectively.

There are roughly 150 million handguns in the United States, according to an NRA-ILA Fact Sheet. That means in 2020, .0054 percent of handguns were used in homicides or one in 18,272.627603. It should be noted that since the landmark Heller ruling in 2008, the Supreme Court has held that handgun bans are unconstitutional.

The next fact that Wallace ignores is that we know what has caused the latest upswing in violent crime: No prosecuting the violent offenders. Take some of the outrageous decisions from Chicago, for instance, or for the prosecutors whose campaigns George Soros has funded. Even if authorities can’t get murder charges perhaps some of the rarely-used provisions of 18 USC 922 and 18 USC 924 could make a dent. The problem is, these aren’t used, and similar state-level provisions also aren’t used.

Second Amendment supporters can debate the wisdom of various gun laws, but the laws that Project Exile enforced can and would make a huge difference in the places that are seeing the worst of violent crime. Part of the way dishonest hacks and anti-Second Amendment extremists will sell the false notion of a ”gun crisis” (especially in the “public health” arena) is to point to murder rates and violent crime.

The ultimate task for Second Amendment supporters is to defeat anti-Second Amendment extremists at the federal, state, and local level – not to mention in corporate boardrooms and elsewhere. However, to do that, they need to not only prove claims of a “gun crisis” are phony, they need to show that the solution to the real crisis is not found in attacking the Second Amendment.

Media Hysteria over Efforts to Protect 2nd Amendment

CNN is on the warpath against politicians and gun rights activist organizations for defending the Second Amendment against efforts to erode the right to keep and bear arms, especially when remarks from Joe Biden are singled out.

In a lengthy report Friday, CNN focused on West Virginia Republican State Rep. Brandon Steele, who has been pushing a “Second Amendment Preservation Act” that would “bar state or local police from enforcing new federal gun restrictions the Biden administration might adopt.”

While the story notes Steele has acknowledged the Biden administration has been so far unsuccessful in pressing what was a sweeping gun control agenda unveiled early in 2020. It is an extremist package that includes a ban on so-called “assault rifles,” waiting periods on handgun purchases, so-called “universal background checks” and regulate semi-auto rifles the same as full-auto machine guns.

The story asserts gun rights groups and politicians have been “gunning up fears that Biden wants to… ‘erase the Second Amendment’ and come to people’s homes and take away their guns.”

CNN recalls a Fox News piece that talked about how Second Amendment groups hit the airwaves with a message that if Biden “can force a needle in your arm, he can take away your gun.” That message was sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation, an organization often overlooked by the establishment media, which is content with demonizing the National Rifle Association. NRA had nothing to do with the message.

CNN declared in its report, “The inflammatory rhetoric surrounding these new laws, critics says, is similar and even connected to claims of 2020 election fraud and pushback against Covid-19 vaccine or mask mandates in that they rely on a denial of reality.”

Perhaps it is CNN that is denying reality. The SAF messages broadcast earlier this fall included quotes from Biden during a CNN Townhall in which he admitted he has been working to prohibit not only semi-auto rifles, but 9mm pistols.

At the time the message ran on some 20 different cable networks, Alan Gottlieb, SAF founder and executive vice president, said in a statement, “Over the past eight months since taking office, Joe Biden has evolved from being an annoying gun control advocate to a dangerously ambitious gun prohibitionist. He hasn’t simply climbed on the gun ban train, he’s now the engineer, portraying so-called ‘gun violence’ as a public health epidemic. He’s perpetuating a myth invented by the gun ban lobby to demonize guns, their owners and the Second Amendment that protects their right to keep and bear arms.”

The CNN story quotes Alexandra Filindra, described as “a political science professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, who studies gun politics, disinformation and social media.” She intimates gun rights defenders as being “part of an ideological system, [and believe] that the other side — in this case, the Democrats — are devious and intent on taking political rights away and imposing a socialistic tyranny.”

The Second Amendment does not protect a “political right.” It protects a fundamental right enumerated in the Constitution, gun rights advocates would respond.

But after Tuesday’s devastating election results for Democrats, whose only bright light seems to be the victory of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy while a Republican truck driver operating on a shoestring budget just beat the leader of the state Senate Democrats, probably will put gun control on the back burner, if not the shelf. Virginia voters replaced Democrats with Republicans in all three statewide races including the governor’s race. In Minneapolis, voters soundly rejected an effort to defund and dismantle the police department. In Seattle, voters rejected candidates who had advocated to defund the police.

It just might be a forecast of things to come next November at the mid-term elections. The rush toward the far left by radical anti-gun Democrats just hit a speed bump, and people behind the efforts to protect the Second Amendment were partly, if not largely responsible.

Fact Check The Left: Let’s Dive into This ABC News Piece About the Assault Weapons Ban

They just don’t care. Maybe that’s where we got off the wrong foot in our counteroffensive concerning false media narratives on firearms and the Second Amendment. It was never about being accurate. It was about the narrative. We saw that explicitly and in its mature form when the Russian collusion nonsense was in full swing.

The media has long mucked up firearm lexicon and legal precedent. Most of the things the media and the anti-gun Left want are already laws. The rest is beyond extraneous that will do nothing but hurt law-abiding Americans’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights. It also won’t enhance public safety, hence the proposed ATF ban on pistol brace stabilizers. All this will do is put 10-40 million Americans in legal jeopardy for doing nothing wrong. And with the Biden presidency crashing and burning, the media has decided to rehash another lie about the so-called assault weapons ban.

First, it’s a fake term. Second, it’s been repackaged yet again as a law that curbed violent crime. It didn’t. It was a trash law, but there were perks. It helped destroy the Democratic Party during the 1994 midterms and forever split the party on the issue. That’s why after Sandy Hook, an amendment to reimpose it in the failed Manchin-Toomey bill was easily defeated. It was a bipartisan legislative skinning, to be honest. That didn’t stop ABC News from peddling this myth:

…in 1989, an AK-47 was used to kill five children at a Stockton, California, elementary school, leading California to become the first state to enact an assault weapons ban, Klarevas said. That was followed by two other high-profile mass shootings with semiautomatic pistols — one in San Francisco and one on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train — in 1993.

Those shootings were the impetus for the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, signed into effect by President Bill Clinton in 1994, stopping the manufacture, sale, transfer and possession of these types of firearms.

The federal law led to a decrease in gun massacre incidents where six or more victims are killed, Klarevas wrote in a report he issued last year as an expert witness in a federal court case challenging California’s ban on assault weapons. When compared to data from 1984 to 1994, the U.S. saw a 43% drop in gun massacre deaths and a 26% decline in gun massacre deaths involving assault weapons in 1994 to 2004, according to his report.

The federal ban was not renewed by Congress and expired in 2004. Gun massacre incidents involving these weapons then skyrocketed from 2004 to 2014, jumping 167% compared to the 10 years the federal law was in effect, Klarevas’ report said, and active shooter incidents with different guns overall have been steadily climbing over the last two decades, according to FBI data, which does not break down murders by exact model of gun used.

While there’s no federal assault weapons ban now, Washington, D.C., and seven states — California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York — have banned the possession of certain kinds of these firearms, and the rules vary state to state. According to Klarevas’ report, “In the past 30 years, accounting for population, states with assault weapons bans in place experienced 54% fewer gun massacres involving the use of assault weapons and 67% fewer deaths resulting from such attacks perpetrated with assault weapons.”

In the decade after the Federal Assault Weapons Ban was enacted in 1994, the U.S. saw a 43% drop in gun massacre deaths, according to one report.

After it expired in 2004, the report said gun massacre incidents involving assault rifles skyrocketed 167%. https://t.co/h33TImwWu5

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) October 27, 2021

You get the gist. The law curbed violent crime. It did not. For starters, rifles and shotguns aren’t used in most firearm-related crimes and homicides. It’s not even close. Second, even liberals who have combed through the numbers honestly know that the assault weapons ban being a major vehicle in crime reduction is a myth. Take Lois Beckett’s piece in The New York Times seven years ago:

…in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.

It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do.

In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.

The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle.

Banning sales of military-style weapons resonated with both legislators and the public: Civilians did not need to own guns designed for use in war zones.

On Sept. 13, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban into law. It barred the manufacture and sale of new guns with military features and magazines holding more than 10 rounds. But the law allowed those who already owned these guns — an estimated 1.5 million of them — to keep their weapons.

The policy proved costly. Mr. Clinton blamed the ban for Democratic losses in 1994. Crime fell, but when the ban expired, a detailed study found no proof that it had contributed to the decline.

The ban did reduce the number of assault weapons recovered by local police, to 1 percent from roughly 2 percent.

“Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” a Department of Justice-funded evaluation concluded.

Most Americans do not know that gun homicides have decreased by 49 percent since 1993 as violent crime also fell, though rates of gun homicide in the United States are still much higher than those in other developed nations. A Pew survey conducted after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., found that 56 percent of Americans believed wrongly that the rate of gun crime was higher than it was 20 years ago.

Now, granted violent crime has spiked due to Democrat-run cities gutting cash bail and declaring all-out war on law enforcement. It’s nowhere near 1993 levels, but it has become a topic on the minds of voters. The fact that most Americans didn’t know gun crime had dropped 49 percent since 1993 and remained that way even after the ban lapsed is a media oversight. The liberal media didn’t do their jobs because—well—it went against the narrative.

It’s handguns you want to target if you want to get heavy-handed on gun crime but look at the polling regarding a handgun ban and you’ll see why no one will touch it. It’s insanely unpopular and unconstitutional. And ABC News also had a piece about handguns being the most used firearm when it comes to homicide, so stop lying guys. The data is there. They ignore it. It’s about the narrative for them, so this ABC News piece is straight garbage—but there are enough liberal dolts who will believe this tripe.

As with anything now, expect most, but not all, pieces from these guys to be intentionally misleading.

CNN Once Again Shows How Leftists Miss the Point on Gun Control

A CNN opinion columnist recently revealed she knows as much about the gun issue as Alec Baldwin does about gun safety (too soon?). Author Jennifer Tucker recently published a piece titled “Now that guns can kill hundreds in minutes, Supreme Court should rethink the rights question,” in which she argued that the types of firearms one could carry should be limited even further.

In the piece, Tucker referred to the “Theoretical Lethality Index” (TLI), which was developed by a U.S. Army colonel named Trevor Dupuy, who conducted a study in 1964 to examine the effectiveness of various weapons. The study produced a table in which various weapons are ranked by how many strikes can they can achieve in an hour. For instance, a mid-19^th century rifle could strike 102 times while a World War II-era machine gun could strike 3,463 times, making it the more lethal weapon.

Tucker seems to indicate that certain guns like the AR15 have the potential to be exceedingly lethal firearms. She writes:

In the 20th century, bullets became smaller and lighter, enabling soldiers to carry more, while design changes increased the damage they caused upon entering the human body. Today, the highly popular civilian AR-15 is a vastly different and substantially more lethal machine than the flintlock muskets that were in use when the Founders crafted the Second Amendment.

The author continues, recalling the tragic Las Vegas shooting which occurred in 2017 when a gunman murdered 58 people and injured 850 others within a span of 10 minutes. “This would have been physically impossible for a single shooter to do in 1791,” she writes.

Then, she makes an argument typical of anti-gunners: The Founding Fathers did not anticipate the evolution of weapons. She argues:

If the Constitution had been written in the 1880s instead of the 1780s, the Framers would have been much more aware of the pace of innovation. The Founders lived in an era when they could be forgiven for thinking that “a gun is a gun is a gun,” because — as the TLI shows — the killing power of the basic flintlock hadn’t changed in the previous 150 or so years. Dramatic changes occurred, however, during and after the Civil War.

The author insists that “given the rapid technological change we’ve seen in firearms over the last century and a half, the notion that guns should be viewed equally across all times and places is logically flawed.”

She goes on to contend that “just as courts don’t regard the bleeding and purging of patients as the gold standards of health care … “common sense dictates that the law must take into account technological change in firearms.”

Her overall point can be summed up in this statement:

There is room for looking at the lethality of modern firearms when considering the constitutionality of gun regulation. The court implicitly acknowledged this in its Heller decision when it stated that machine gun bans were acceptable. It’s a difficult concession to explain unless the court is considering the modern capabilities of firearms outside of the historical scope of regulation.

The Supreme Court is set to adjudicate what could be a landmark case when it comes to gun rights. The judges will review New York Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen, which is a case targeting New York’s gun licensing scheme. The plaintiffs allege that the state’s approach to deciding who is allowed to possess a license to carry a firearm violates the Second Amendment.

In her piece, Tucker argues:

Weapons designed with an ever-increasing capacity to kill large numbers of people in battle, with long barrels and large-capacity magazines, have no place in public spaces, supermarkets, and shopping malls — not on the grounds of a generic right to self-defense. When it takes up this new gun case, the Court should take technological innovation into account and acknowledge that guns are now exponentially more lethal than they were when the Constitution was written.

We’ve heard these arguments before, haven’t we?

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Elite Media Can’t Stop Lying About Guns in America

The mainstream media lies to us. They feed us propaganda. They don’t want us to know that gun ownership is widespread and that armed defense is common. I was at a conference for minor-media this weekend. There, an associate talked about being turned away from most of his local news stations because “we don’t run pro-gun stories. No self-defense.” Let me show you where the propaganda starts at the top.

Dr. John Lott looked at the five largest newspapers in the US. They ran 1 self-defense story for every 1300 stories of criminal activity with a gun. (more here)

The good news, and there is some good news, is that we know better. We have data that comes from outside the media bubble. We caught major US newspapers lying to us. We can actually measure the amount of media distortion.

We use a firearm for defense far more often than the thugs use guns during a crime. We legally defend ourselves about four times more often than a criminal uses a gun to threaten or injure us (467 thousand criminal incidents vs 1.4-2.3 million defensive gun uses).

We can quantify the media exaggeration. Honest reporting would tell us when we were attacked and also tell us when we defended ourselves. That isn’t what we get from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, or the Wall Street Journal. Each time it occurs, these major US newspapers were over 5 thousand times more likely to run a story of victimization than defense. Distortions of that magnitude can’t be an accident. That censorship is the result of deliberate editorial policy.

That is serious. That biased reporting distorts public perception of violence and defense. It twists public policy, and it isn’t an accident. Media propaganda isn’t a fault, but a deliberate feature that was bought and paid for.

Anti-gun billionaires paid millions of dollars to twist the news. They ran “educational” conferences for the media on how to report self-defense as “gun violence”. They also pay propagandists to recommend movie and TV scripts that distort the truth about civilian self-defense.

You can prove it to yourself. We defend ourselves more often than the police, and ordinary citizens make fewer mistakes with a gun than the police. So, when was the last time you saw an honest portrayal of armed defense on the TV cop dramas where an ordinary person used a firearm responsibly? I couldn’t find a single one.

Media apologists have said that self-defense isn’t news. I disagree. The biased media buries armed defense stories even in incidents where armed citizens stopped mass murder. Again, the media was too busy lying about us and our neighbors to report the truth.

I’m reminded of the Chinese immigrant who said he never watched the news when he was in China because he knew the news was filled with lies. Again, let me close by sharing some good news. We’re walking away from the lying media. CNN lost half its viewers in the last year.

Find real news and listen past the lies.