http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD7vnGe-1HY
By B.
The New York Times never misses an opportunity to tell its readers that guns are bad. How best to do that? By waving a convenient bloody shirt, of course. In other words, taking advantage of a tragedy and heightened emotions to push their agenda. In this case, world famous sprinter, Oscar Pistorius — aka “The Blade Runner” — allegedly shot his super model girlfriend four times, killing her. Bingo! Another tragedy that fits well with the NYT view that guns in the hands of ordinary citizens are bad. So . . .
why not use it to their advantage? Never mind that the Olympic runner might have had anger management issues and, in a crime of passion, killed his girlfriend with a knife, cricket bat, hammer gun. He murdered his girlfriend.
In a case of comparing apples to oranges, the NYT has chosen to subliminally show its readers what they, the NYT wants them to see. Guns are bad. If they are bad in SA, they must therefore be bad in the USA. So they provide some dubious sources and attempt to show that homicides with guns have dropped in the past decade in SA. Proof positive, therefore, that SA’s Firearms Control Act of 2004 is working.
From the Times’ piece:
Adele Kirsten of Gun-Free South Africa, an organization opposing gun violence, said that whatever the motive, the shooting was avoidable. “The idea that you have a gun to protect your family against intruders, the data doesn’t bear that out,” Ms. Kirsten said. “What it tells us is that having a gun in your home puts you and your family at risk of being shot.”
Homicides involving guns have declined in South Africa in the past decade, Ms. Kirsten said, a development many here attribute to the Firearms Control Act of 2004.
What a credible and unbiased source they have chosen for us sheeple to read. Yes, Ms. Kirsten, the shooting was avoidable. The murder however, was not. He wanted to kill her and, judging but the four shots, he wanted to make sure she was dead. That’s some deep seated anger there. The kind that transcends the means and manifests itself as pure motive.
He wanted her dead and absent a gun, he would have used something else, such as a knife. If he’d used a blade, would we now be talking about how having a knife in the home increases your family’s chances of being stabbed? Probably not.
The NYT then goes on to cite some unreferenced “facts” to show the joyful effects of the 2004 FCA.
The overall murder rate has dropped by 50 percent since its peak in the late 1990s, and the number of women killed by intimate partners using a gun has also dropped. In 2009, 17 percent of such intimate partner killings were gun-related, down from nearly 31 percent in 1999.
Makes me almost want to move to SA. Except that I don’t. Because no matter what the Times’ sources may be telling them, the State Department has given South Africa’s major cities its highest rating of ‘critical’ for the rampant crime there.
The Times wants you to believe that gun control will work equally well here, too. Subliminally. So they have to feed their readers a steady diet of anti-gun propaganda thinly disguised as a news stories. They need examples of where gun control works. Only they can’t point to the UK, Europe’s most violent country. That’s old news. But using South Africa to sell civilian disarmament is proving to be a tough sell. So here the would like you believe that SA is proof that gun control works. Never mind that there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to Crime South Africa. Even the left leaning allafrica.com is skeptical.
After showing how firearms deaths have declined since the FCA’s implementation, they have to give up the farce and begrudgingly admit, in smaller print that
Up until 2007, firearms overshadowed other external causes of non-natural violent deaths such as sharp force injuries, burns and strangulations, amongst others, but in that year, sharp force injuries overtook firearms as the leading cause of non-natural violent deaths.
So lets connect the dots. As the gun crime went down, other forms of crime went up. Drastically. But hey, gun crime is down, and that’s a good thing, right? Wrong. Just ask the increasing numbers of rape and sexual assault victims there. Or maybe the white farmers in SA can tell Americans how much they like being disarmed?
In order to be intellectually honest, All Africa has to acknowledge that the facts they obtained to show declining gun crime came from the South African Police Service (SAPS)
It must be noted that while the SAPS data is not considered the most reliable source on crime data, as victims often do not report crimes to the SAPS for varying reasons. Nonetheless, the data collected by the SAPS still provides a fairly good indication of the crimes and acts of violence taking place within South Africa.
Translation: Our data sucks and is probably not accurate, but it shows what we want it to show, so we’ll use it to push our agenda. We can put a positive spin on it by saying it’s all we bothered to use as a source the best we have have, so it’ll work for the purposes for which we need it.
In the fight to preserve our Second Amendment rights, we have to see articles like the Times’ piece for what they are: propaganda. The kind that slowly works its way into the subconscious of their readers. planting the seed of disarmament. I’m not worried about the Armed Intelligensia who have the experience to put stories like these in perspective. And I’m not even worried about the legions of limousine liberals in New York who lap up the NYT’s propaganda like $350 a plate caviar.
I am worried, though, about readers who don’t always look deeper into the story, think the NYT must be credible because, after all, it’s the New York Times and thus, think they’re actually reading the “news”. This kind of bait and switch is a favorite tactic, not only the NYT, but most of the mainstream media as a whole and consistently run examples of the “wisdom” of gun control without actually showing the flip side — that crime itself marches on. With or without guns. The only question now is, do you want to be an armed citizen or a disarmed victim?