Voice of America Offers Strange Take on SCOTUS Ruling

This has been a crazy week for reporting on guns following the SCOTUS ruling. But Voice of America has the strangest voice on the matter. It offers some choice quotes from only one side of the issue:

“Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said he expects criminals convicted of gun charges to use Monday’s ruling to challenge their convictions.”

Either we’re reading this wrong, or Voice of America is reporting this wrong, but does this even make sense? What does the ruling about gun ownership have to do with criminals? If someone broke the law, they broke the law.

And Voice of America also had a choice quote from Chicago Mayor Richard Daley:

“I don’t think America should be known for ‘we could kill more people than any other nation.’ We love to kill, we can kill overseas, we export more guns than anybody else, and we buy more guns than anybody else, and ammunition. That should not be known as a great country.”

Mr. Daley doesn’t speak for all of us obviously. We can respect that all Americans should have a right to decide what makes us a great country, but Daley is flat out wrong when it comes to the facts on the issue. While it is true that the United States is a large exporter of small arms, the United States is not even in the top five of small arms importers (source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). India, Singapore, Malaysia, Greece and South Korea are the world’s largest arms importers at the present time.

Maybe Mr. Daley and Voice of America should do a little more fact checking.