keep and bear arms – to accept personal responsibility to defend home and family – the media is a long way from fair and balanced, It Feeds Flat Out Lies To The Public…
By de Andréa
During the first seven months of 2007, the media waged an intermittent war against the Second Amendment, using a variety of fallacious arguments to make the pitch for gun bans and the future demise of a free America.
A crime wave in the big cities, followed by the Virginia Tech tragedy in April, gave the media what they thought was plenty of ammunition for attacking the right to bear arms. The three major broadcast networks ran at least 650 stories on gun homicides from January through July. In a manner reminiscent of Michael Moore, journalists sprinkled post-Virginia Tech news coverage with comparisons between the United States and other countries that have stricter gun control laws and less crime.
The media first broached the urban crime wave immediately following a March 9 court decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, which struck down the D C handgun ban. ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today each ran at least one story on the DC crime wave between March 9 and March 29.
On the March 10 NBC Nightly News, anchor John Seigenthaler tried to link the crime wave and the decision. “A new study of major cities shows an alarming rise in violence … This comes on the heels of a federal court decision striking down a 31 year old gun ban law in Washington, D.C., on the grounds that it violated the constitutional right to bear arms.” What Seigenthaler failed to mention is that the D.C. gun ban was still in effect while the crime wave was taking place.
CBS failed to report that police chiefs who support gun control are in the minority. A 2005 survey by the National Association of Chiefs of Police found that 93.6 percent of chiefs and sheriffs support “civilian gun ownership rights,” and 63.1 percent claimed that concealed-weapons permits reduce violent crime. Not surprisingly, the same survey reports that 93.2 percent say the news media is “not fair and balanced in this regard, and in fact lies about it.”
The Virginia Tech shootings on April 16 encouraged the media to accelerate massively their campaign against the Second Amendment. Journalists would eventually demonstrate their willingness to smear their own country in order to promote gun control.
Just as Michael Moore, in his movie Sicko, excoriated America’s private healthcare system by inaccurately comparing it to socialized medicine in other countries, journalists blasted America’s constitutional right to bear arms by pointing to countries that have stricter gun laws and less crime. What the media fails to point out is the fact that these countries are also run by a socialist dictatorship.
The embattled university, Keteyian asserted, has desperately fought Virginia’s “hunting culture” in order to “safeguard the student population.” even though it has obviously had the opposite effect.
NBC anchor Brian Williams’s heaped praise on Britain’s gun ban on the April 17 Nightly News: “Britain outlawed handguns, and anyone caught with one faces a minimum prison sentence of five years. They are so opposed to guns here that not even police officers on routine patrol carry them. Now gun violence is rare.” Williams not only ignored several salient facts: such as by tradition, British “bobbies” have rarely carried firearms; moreover Brian Williams flatly lied about the decrease in Britain’s crime rate since the gun ban... (see information from Britain showing that the opposite is true) The UK experienced more than a 40% increase in gun violence the 2 years following the National gun ban. Moreover, Britain now has a growing problem with knife violence. Other nations where gun ownership is common enjoy low rates of gun violence. For example, Switzerland, which has very low crime rates, actually issues assault rifles to all adult males for citizen’s militia service.
Two days after the Virginia Tech massacre, the Washington Post was also taking lines from the Michael Moore playbook, attacking not only the Second Amendment, but also American foreign policy. Nations around the world reported the Post, “used the university attack to condemn what they depicted as U.S. policies to arm friends, attack enemies and rely on violence rather than dialogue to settle disputes.”
The New York Times took aim at a target closer to home. “It is the gun lobby’s incessant efforts to weaken the gun laws that make a tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech possible,” screeched the Gray Lady in an April 26 editorial.
The Media’s Omissions
In their zeal to repeal the Second Amendment, the media failed to inform their audience of at least four powerful arguments against gun control.
Comparisons between countries are not useful. Unfortunately, direct comparisons between countries based solely on crime rates and gun laws tell very little about whether gun control actually works. Social scientists believe that gun control is only one of many factors that influence rates of violence. The National Academy of Sciences cautioned in a 2004 report, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, that, “It is difficult to gauge the value of [gun control] measures because social and economic factors behind criminal acts are often complex and interwoven, and the efforts are narrow in scope.”
As Brian Williams compared the U.S. and Britain to promote gun control, a pro-gun analyst could easily cherry pick countries to “prove” that gun control does not work. New Zealand, with very limited gun restrictions, has an annual gun homicide rate of 0.18 per 100,000 population. While South Africa, where the Firearm Control Act of 2000 licenses firearms to virtually no one, has a rate of 7457 per 100,000.
A 1998 Library of Congress report concluded, “From available statistics, among 27 countries surveyed, it is impossible to find a correlation between the existence of strict firearms regulations and a lower incidence of gun-related crimes.”
Guns are frequently used to stop crimes. Between January 1 and August 1, the media completely failed to report on an issue most relevant to the Second Amendment debate, the legitimate use of guns in self-defense. To the Founding Fathers, the right to bear arms for self-protection was essential if citizens were to be truly free. Alexander Hamilton addressed the “original right of self defense” in Federalist 28. Under a “confederacy” that protects the right to bear arms, wrote Hamilton, “the people, without exaggeration, may be said to be entirely the masters of their own fate.” In other words, to have the ability to accept responsibility for defending themselves, rather than having to rely exclusively on the government. Hamilton knew what he was talking about; guns are often used to stop criminals. A survey by the United States Journal of Criminal Law, more than 2.5 million people use a gun in self-defense each year.
This essential fact never saw the light of day in the mainstream media. From January through July, armed self defense almost never made it into the news While the three major TV networks broadcast at least 650 stories about gun homicides, CMI was able to find only two stories about guns used by citizens to defend themselves.
John Stossel, anchor of ABC’s 20/20, referred to two cases of armed self-defense on the May 4 show. NBC’s Today show of April 23 featured former Miss America Venus Ramey, 82, who chased an intruder off her property with a shotgun.
The major networks also failed to mention a highly relevant incident, the 2002 shooting at the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, Virginia. After killing three people, a gunman was forced to surrender by two armed students.
Virginia Tech, in contrast, did not allow students to be armed, so nobody was able to stop Seung-Hui Cho on that fateful day in Norris Hall.
Most guns used in crimes are illegally acquired. Like it or not, banning guns only takes them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens, making it easier for people with no respect for the law to attack their victims.
The National Academy of Sciences concluded in its report, Firearms and
Violence, that only 21 percent of the guns used to commit crimes in this country are bought legally.
In some countries with stricter gun control laws, the proportion can drop well below 10 percent. Legally purchased guns are rarely used to commit crimes, but every time a gun ban is passed, responsible citizens lose the capacity to defend themselves and their families.
Gun control laws have no proven effect. At worst, gun control laws leave law-abiding citizens defenseless before rapacious criminals, and at best, they may not affect violence at all.
The Firearms and Violence study surveyed local gun control policies around the nation, including more than 80 education programs designed to prevent violence in children, but could not find any that actually reduced gun violence.
Kleck G, Gertz M. “The illegitimacy of one-sided speculation: getting the defensive gun use estimate down.”
.">Journal of Criminal Law. 1997;87:1446-1461. Quoted. In Kleck, Gary. August 8, 2007. 7 10 percent in Australia, according to the British Journal of Criminology. “Buyback has no effect on murder rate.”
October 24, 2006. Sydney Morning Herald. August 8, 2007. In Germany, with one of the strictest gun policies in the world, the percentage falls to 0.004 percent. “Germany reevaluates gun laws after school shooting.” November 23, 2006. Deutsche Welle. August 8, 2007.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published one of the most comprehensive surveys of gun control laws ever in 2003. The survey looked at bans on firearms, restrictions on firearms, waiting periods and licensing, zero tolerance laws in schools, “GUN FREE ZONES” childhood access prevention laws and combinations of all of these. The result? “The Task Force found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws
Why does the media repeatedly make the same faulty assumptions and advance the same shopworn arguments for expensive and intrusive gun control policies that have no proven effect on crime, and render law-abiding citizens helpless to defend themselves? In a word, ideology. The argument for gun control has always been based more on utopian visions than empirical facts. That, and the left simply does not trust an armed citizenry.
The media’s incessant attack on the Second Amendment demonstrates clearly their hate America liberal agenda against gun ownership.
Read a Harvard law School Study about more guns less crime.
Read what John Lott says about More Guns Not Less
THE BOTTOM LINE: I am going to try to be kind now by saying that no one could be so ignorant as to really believe that America would be better off with a British or Australian type gun ban. One does not even need to go to other countries to see the disastrous results of gun bans, Washington DC has had a virtual gun ban for over 30 years and since then DC’s violent crime rate has gone up and up, making Washington DC the Murder Capital of The USA. While at the same time, the overall murder rate for the US has been in decline.
No, the Issue it is not ignorance or even crime, it is an agenda of the far liberal left to achieve ultimate power and control, and total dependence on government agency’s. This socialist utopia talks good, but it does not walk straight. In all of history, one has never been able to depend on government for anything. Therefore the old saying “there’s never a cop when you need one”. Our freedom was not even acquired by the government; it was a bunch of rag tag farmers with guns that defeated the most powerful military in the world and won our freedom. It was the citizen’s militia then, and it is the citizen’s militia now, as the second Amendment says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
de Andréa
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