I’ve got a new one for you: “assault media.” That’s what I call media organizations who assault Americans’ natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms. The New York Times recent front page editorial – calling for firearms confiscation – put them at the head of the mainstream media civilian disarmament campaign. (Provided you discount The New York Posts‘ unconscionable efforts to portray the NRA as terrorists.) Now the the Times has outed itself, it’s continuing its civilian disarmament campaign . . .
In the Times‘ N.Y. / Region Section (?), we get In Scotland, Unlike America, Mass Shooting Led to Stricter Gun Laws. That’s news? No. No it’s not. The Dunblane school massacre happened 19 years ago. The article is pure anti-gun agitprop: propaganda designed to agitate the masses into pursuing the paper’s gun confiscation agenda. Complete with the obligatory picture of the Newtown slaughter [above]. With not a single mention of the importance of American gun rights. Like this . . .
The tightening of Britain’s gun laws, which gave the authorities more control over the licensing of weapons, is seen as both a boon to public safety and a salve to the town’s collective grief . . .
Across the ocean and 16 years later, America absorbed its own massacre of 5- and 6-year-olds at the school in Newtown. The inaction that emerged from Washington, however, was the opposite of what came out of Westminster after the Dunblane shooting. And in the three years since 20 children were fatally shot at Sandy Hook Elementary School, no consensus on the rewriting of national gun laws in America has formed.
Rather, some say, the supporters of gun rights have seemed to gain strength, stymying President Obama’s efforts to craft laws that would help reduce the kind of mass shootings that now occur regularly around the country. The support for an automatic weapons ban, in fact, has seemingly been silenced.
Yes, I know: it’s an “assault weapons” ban. Not an “automatic weapons ban.” Inadvertent conflation or deliberate disinformation? Although I ascribe to Hanlon’s Razor – “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity” – it’s clear that this article is an anti-gun rights editorial disguised as reporting. Here’s the only pro-gun voice in the piece. Well, not really.
While the killings at Sandy Hook might have “hit over the head” people predisposed toward action intended to counter America’s epidemic of gun violence, “the rest of the nation was not hit in quite the same way,” said Samuel Walker, professor emeritus at the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska.
“There were more people who said, ‘Well, we ought to put more guns in schools,’” in the hands of law enforcement or security officers, Mr. Walker said.
To him, such a response reflects the worship of guns that exists in American culture.
Epidemic of gun violence! Gun worshipping [bible clinging] America! Is there a New York Times stylebook for “reporting” on guns? Or are the papers’ writers so inculcated in the Left’s anti-gun rights agenda that they all parrot the party line? Yes! But wait! There’s more!
“It’s like a religious object, an extension of your body,” he said. “We can’t begin to make any progress in controlling it.”
The United States has “high levels of interpersonal violence” greater than anywhere in Western Europe and it has embedded a cultural preference for guns in many corners of society, Mr. Walker said.
I guess the New York Times’ fact checkers were so exhausted after the Republican debate that they couldn’t muster the energy needed to shout WTF at the reporter – one Al Baker – who allowed Mr. Walker’s outrageous claim to run unremarked.
As you’d expect, the article ends with the assault media’s number one tactic: tugging at the heart-strings. What they’re actually doing is tugging on the thread of liberty. God help us if it’s undone.