Rachel Maddow Brings Expert Who Doesn’t Know Guns
Don’t you love it when liberal talking heads get all worked up about firearms with so-called experts, who then just randomly start making up terms, which just proves that they’re not really all that experienced in the topic. Case in point, on the Rachel Maddow Show, Frank Shaeffer, author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back and a Huffington Post blogger offered this insight:
“I don’t take kindly to looking at a bunch of old white guys about my age with pot bellies grabbing 50-millimeter machine guns and putting them on pickup trucks .”
Maybe this was an off the cuff slip up, but he never corrected himself. There is a big difference between a .50 caliber machinegun and a 50mm gun. Big difference!
Video is available from our friends at Newsbusters.org.
Arkansas Times Offers Insulting Blog Post on Open Carry Debate
Is it fair to label those in support of open carry rights to be “nuts?” The author of the Arkansas Times Arkansas Blog thinks so in a post titled “Annals of gun nuttery,” which provides this colorful take:
“Concealed weapon laws are no longer enough for the gun zealots. Open carry is the new rage (and I do mean rage) and the threats of angry gun packers have spooked, among others, Starbucks, into not adopting the law-allowed private property rules against guns on premises.”
Poor choice of words maybe, but this is yet another attempt to paint all gun owners as “angry” and filled with “mean rage.”
NY Times News Story Offers Opinion – Anti-Gun Opinion at That
In a piece looking at both sides of the “open carry” debate that is raging around the country, The New York Times threw in just a tad about of anti-gun rhetoric:
“Newer, more driven by grass-roots and the Internet than the N.R.A., open-carry groups are also less centralized, less predictable and often more confrontational in their push for gun rights.”
The author goes on to suggest to the reader the dangers of such a move:
“Gun control advocates have raised particular concerns about open-carry laws because under these laws in many states, gun owners are not required to have a permit or any sort of training or testing.”
What is the point of stressing the issue of permits for example? On the one hand the new groups are described as “less predictable” and “confrontational,” wording that could imply these to be “dangerous” to some New York readers. Likewise, it is practically implied that it would create a wild west situation without any permits where novices carry guns. This news piece reads like an editorial at times, but should we expect anything less from the “old gray lady?”
Six-Year Old Suspended From School for Make Believe Gun
Now it seems even a pretend gun can land a child in trouble. We’re not talking a realistic toy gun, or even a picture of a toy gun; we’re talking about a child using his fingers while playing! The Grand Rapids Press in Michigan noted:
“Mason Jammer, a kindergarten student at Jefferson Elementary in Ionia, curled his fist into the shape of a gun Wednesday and pointed it at another student, school officials said it was no laughing matter.”
For the record we have no problem with the reporting on this one, but we must question Ionia’s school board on this judgment. The child just turned six-years old, and some other form of discipline should have been used.
Detroit News Offers Reasonable Editorial on Guns
Could it be that not everyone in the mainstream media hates guns? That’s the feeling we’re getting as we read more editorials supporting reasonable gun laws. The latest example is an editorial in The Detroit News, a city that has more than its fair share of crime. The piece ends with this very well put consideration:
“Guns should be subject to reasonable regulations, including requirements that their sale be subject to waiting periods and background checks.
“But personal gun ownership in America has a tradition pre-dating our existence as an independent country and the Second Amendment should be recognized throughout the nation.”
Well said.
CSM Asks Whether Guns Really Protect Us From Tyranny
In a surprisingly well-researched sidebar to the gun rights debate raging in the Supreme Court, Warren Richey of The Christian Science Monitor looked at whether firearm ownership actually keeps a nation free from tyranny. And while the paper is usually fairly biased against guns, this piece presented key facts that would suggest past tyrants succeeded because they first disarmed the population.
It is a shame more stories in the mainstream media aren’t so unbiased, and actually try to present facts for readers instead of opinion.
It Can’t Happen Here: R.J. Rummel’s Documentation of Democide
Scholar R.J. Rummel has engaged in extensive work on the murder of civilians, by agents of their own government. During the twentieth century he has documented well over two hundred million civilians killed by their own government. This number is far greater than the number of soldiers killed during the same time.
One of the problems of dealing with such large numbers is that it is impossible to really imagine such quantities. Stalin was fond of saying that “twelve deaths was a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” Also, our media is very leftist in its world view. Therefore you are likely to see dozens of movies portraying the Nazis for the murdering thugs they were, but rarely do they show anything which casts a negative light on the communists. This is an indisputable fact. Read more
CSM Says Gun Rights Not the Same as Free Speech
The Christian Science Monitor is a typical liberal leaning example of the mainstream media that pulls no punches when it comes to bias against firearms. Case in point, in an editorial published this week, the outlet offers:
“The Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday that could result in striking down a handgun ban in Chicago and other places. But beyond that, the court must clarify how fundamental gun rights are. They shouldn’t be viewed as equal to free-speech rights.”
We ask the CSM and the author, why shouldn’t gun rights be viewed as equal to free-speech rights? The editorial offers this argument:
“Firearms must be treated differently from free speech. Slinging guns is not the same as slinging slurs. Guns can kill a person, while any child can quote that ’sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ (except for yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, for which there is a restriction).”
The irony of all this is that the CSM is offering this editorial in response to McDonald v. Chicago, where a 70-something man in Chicago simply wants a gun to protect his home and his wife. So no slinging guns is not the same, but when the criminals aren’t following the law, why should law-abiding citizens be put at risk? Words can never hurt you, but criminals with far more than unkind words can ruin your life, and men such as Mr. McDonald should be able to have something to back up their strong words.
Huntsville Times Sports Reporter Should Stick to Sports
We at FirearmsTruth don’t report much on sports. We’re not sports reporters, so we suggest that Sports Columnist Mark McCarter of The Huntsville Times should stick to covering baseball and basketball, and stay away from guns. He wrote a highly unfavorable column about Alabama’s legislation that allows people to keep firearms in their cars, with the insulting title ” Senate gun vote makes it easier for nut cases.”
As a reporter he actually says:
“I’m a big fan of the U.S. Constitution, even if that ‘well-regulated militia’ part before we get to ‘right to bear arms’ is outdated. I don’t happen to believe that having sensible gun control laws equates to ‘you can never hunt deer again.’”
Not only is McCarter’s point not exactly clear, and find the sentence a little too conversational, but is a journalist really saying part of the Constitution is outdated? Maybe he wouldn’t feel that way if this were a discussion of the First Amendment, the one that guarantees freedom of the press. This guarantee includes print, but also radio, TV and the Internet – the latter three not around when this document was written!
On another note, McCarter tries to throw in several facts and brings up this point:
“There was another short story in our paper that ran last summer. A Mobile police officer named Brandon Sigler was shot and killed. Richard Hollingsworth shot him with a weapon that had been stolen from a deputy’s car.”
We regularly do our “Who Guards the Guards” pieces here, and we note that many police officer’s do have their weapons stolen from their cars. This is unfortunate and this needs to change. We agree that cars make impractical long-term storage for firearms, but the point of this new law wasn’t about transporting guns in vehicles, it was about whether individuals could keep their guns in their cars at work. This could include gated or guarded parking lots. The point here is that the cars are an individual’s property, even if the vehicles are on an employer’s property. But clearly only “nuts” want to transport guns anywhere according to McCarter.
Seattle Times Throws Biased Sidebar in Gun Debate Story
The Supreme Court could decide once and for all if Chicago’s prohibition of firearms is truly constitutional, and while The Seattle Times this weekend ran a rather fair story on the issue – citing legal issues and past cases – the editors felt it necessary to include this sidebar:
Gun facts
By some estimates, about 90 million people in the United States own a total of some 200 million guns. Roughly 30,000 people in the United States die each year from gun violence; more than half are suicides. An additional 70,000 are wounded.
The Associated Press
These “facts” are clearly anti-firearms, stressing only the worst sides of guns. That clearly seems to be the intent doesn’t it?
