A couple of weeks ago the NSSF and NRA held an event for writers and journalists in the shooting range under their Fairfax, Virginia headquarters. The goal: give writers some real world experience shooting suppressed firearms so that they could better inform their readers about the much discussed Hearing Protection Act.
Here’s the text of the letter the NRA sent to The Washington Post (and others):
Hope things are well with you. I wanted to reach out to the Post editorial staff and invite any of you to come out to the NRA on Tuesday to meet with NRA-ILA executive director Chris Cox and witness/take part in a ‘silencer’ shoot.
As you know, the Hearing Protection Act has been introduced and it aims to make what we call suppressors easier to get.
There’s a lot of misinformation about suppressors – although your paper did an excellent fact check about them not too long ago. This is a chance for anyone on the editorial page to come out and ask some questions and see for themselves what shooting with a ‘silencer’ is really like.
The Washington Post ignored the event. Instead they published an anti-silencer rant three days later. And when the NRA tried to call them out, the Post edited their comments.
When the NRA expressed their annoyance to The Washington Post they were told to write a letter to the editor. And they did. But when that letter was published, WaPo played fast and loose with the electronic correction fluid. The Washington Examiner picks up the story:
Of course, the paper suggested the NRA write a letter, which it did, including a line about its invitation to the Post: “If the editorial board had accepted NRA’s invitation to a suppressor shoot last week, they would have heard for themselves that the Hearing Protection Act is exactly what its title claims: An act that protects hearing.”
The paper, however, cut that line. The Post’s letters editor told Secrets, “We reserve the right to edit letters. As part of our normal process, we share edited letters with letter-writers at least twice in the process (including a final edited version).” Most news organizations have an identical policy.
Not good enough, said Jennifer Baker, the spokeswoman for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action.
The Washington Post’s argument against the Hearing Protection Act is based on a bogus talking point from the gun control lobby that falsely claim suppressors pose a risk because the gunshots are silent. They are not silent — not by a long shot. The facts are indisputable and if the Post editorial writers had accepted our invitation to listen to a firearm shot suppressed they would know this, which is exactly why they refused to participate in a demonstration. When the NRA attempted to set the record straight and expose their efforts to spread the lies being peddled by Michael Bloomberg’s gun control groups the Post curtailed our First Amendment rights. This is a great example of fake news and why the mainstream media has a credibility problem with the American public.”
Maybe that’s one reason that newspaper circulation is at a 77-year low. Anyway, this is another case of liberal elites being satisfied in their own supposed intellectual superiority, unwilling to take even the smallest steps to gain an actual understanding of something they want to regulate.
The same people who regularly bash Congress for trying to fix the healthcare system as “old white men trying to legislate women’s bodies” won’t take a couple of minutes out of their day to better understand how a silencer actually works before publicly demanding that they remain strictly regulated.
It’s an oft-told DC story. Uneducated people, safe within their bubbles of ignorance, who think they know everything refusing to learn even the slightest bit of information lest it jostle the them free of their pre-conceived groupthink-approved conclusions. Same as it ever was.