WaPo Offers Another Anti-Gun Editorial
We almost thought the year would run out before the editors at The Washington Post offered another anti-gun rant that blamed America for Mexico’s woes. No such luck. This week the editors at WaPo essentially pulled some paragraphs from past editorials and posted it once again.
The op-ed piece includes this passage:
“Over the past three years, some 30,000 people have been gunned down in Mexico in attacks fueled by drug cartels. Military and law enforcement officers there have seized some 60,000 weapons that were used in these crimes and traced to the United States. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has pleaded with U.S. officials to step up enforcement of gun laws and reinstate the assault-weapons ban. Doing so would be good policy but would trigger a fierce fight. For the moment, the administration has something much more modest in mind.” Read more
Richmond Times-Dispatch Questions “Gun Show Loophole”
Apparently not everyone in the mainstream media is buying into the reporting from The Washington Post and other anti-gun agenda based news outlets. The Richmond Times-Dispatch offered an editorial titled “Gun Shows: Some Loophole,” noting:
“Since an individual who is not a licensed gun dealer can sell a firearm to another individual without a background check — the “loophole” in question — it might be the case that some of the 107 legally obtained guns were bought through person-to-person sales at gun shows. Or not. There is no more hard evidence for that hypothesis than there is for the hypothesis that half of the 107 legally obtained guns were bought by blond men with tattoos.”
The paper further notes something that many anti-gun zealots refuse to acknowledge, namely that states with less restrictive gun laws are the source of “crime guns.” This is a fact that is stated time and time again, yet with little proof. The Times-Dispatch offers this though:
“Yet gun-control advocates continue to insist that ‘states that have not closed the gun-show loophole are far more likely to be the source of crime guns.’ But were those crime guns bought at gun shows — or from crooked dealers, or perhaps stolen? Gun-control advocates don’t say.”
It is refreshing to see that some newspaper editors aren’t just going with the standard line on guns and gun show loopholes.
Firing Back: NY Times Cites WaPo
Isn’t The New York Times anti-gun enough already? Apparently not, as the Old Gray Lady’s editors referenced a recent Washington Post anti-gun editorial. But the NY Times is also showing a bit of sour grapes as well, offering this editorial the weekend before election day, knowing that the new congress will likely be even friendlier to the Second Amendment supporters.
In it, the editors offer this thought:
“As a new Congress looms, we suggest lawmakers travel to Washington by way of West Virginia and an obscure federal building called the National Tracing Center. There they can see workers laboring through unmanageably high backlogs of handwritten paper records submitted by the nation’s gun dealers. This is Congress’s handiwork — at the behest of the gun lobby and to the detriment of public safety.”
What this editorial doesn’t say is that there are more guns in private hands and yet less crime. But this editorial is notable for what it doesn’t say. It never draws attention to the fact that the gun lobby is powerful because it speaks for the people on election day, in other words this is what people west of the Hudson River really want.
As we’ve noted previously, too often editors at the Times and WaPo seem to think that from the extreme east coast they tell what they believe is right for the country, but never see the country. They don’t see the hunters, they don’t see the collectors and they don’t see the gun shows. They don’t see these things because their respective cities, New York City and Washington, D.C., have had such harsh gun laws that private citizens were all but stripped of their Second Amendment rights, and thus the gun lobby has ensured as goes New York and D.C. so won’t go the rest of the country.
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette Cites (Part of) WaPo Editorial
This week The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reprinted just part of a Washington Post editorial. It included the same anti-gun bias as the original piece, but yet was concise enough to further offer misleading facts.
Here is perhaps the most misleading bit of (mis)information:
“As the Supreme Court ruled two years ago, the Constitution of the United States protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. But limits or conditions attach to even fundamental rights. For far too long, lawmakers have catered to the whims of the gun lobby with little or no thought for public safety.”
This sentence implies there are NO limits to the right to keep and bare arms? What about the National Firearms Act of 1934, or the Gun Control Act of 1968? How about the Domestic Violence Offender Gun Ban, or the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act? Each of this set limits and conditions with absolute regard for thought for public safety.
WaPo Shows More Anti-Gun Bias in Tracing Flow of Illegal Guns
The Washington Post is looking to “investigate” the national flow of guns as part of a new series on “The Hidden Life of Guns.” This includes photo galleries, video of the ATF tracing center and a nifty (but very buggy) Flash presentation that shows which states are exporters and which are importers.
As expected this report draws the conclusion that states with so-called “weak” gun laws export more guns, and those with “tough” gun laws import more guns. This of course, according to the report, is how criminals get guns.
The report further notes that the gun lobby continues to block the ATF from conducting tracing. And while the report does offer insight from both sides of the issue, this is still WaPo and there is plenty of subtle (and not so subtle) bias thrown in with a multimedia report titled, “A Source of Crime Guns,” and a video that shows how the ATF is protecting “us” from those crime guns. In other words, the agenda is still clear.
WaPo Looks at Gun Tracing
The Washington Post used the same old line when reporting about the tracing of firearms. In the first paragraph words such as “rogue gun dealers” and “black market” are thrown about. The article offers numerous reasons why the tracing of guns is always a good thing, and offers the counter point of the NRA pushing an agenda.
This article, as with so many from WaPo (and other left-leaning mainstream media outlets) is confusing. They talk about freedoms, as in “Freedom of Information Act,” but then really like the word “control” when it is about guns. The paper even offers the line, “for three decades, tracing was used mostly to help police catch criminals linked to recovered guns.”
Is this really a fact? How many innocent people, who had their guns stolen, may have had to face unfair police scrutiny because of this tracing? More importantly, doesn’t this statement speculate the facts, as there is no supporting evidence? Should we really be surprised?
Washington Independent Parrots WaPo While Adding Own Misinformation
The Washington Independent didn’t offer much of an independent voice, instead just restating the same biased reporting as The Washington Post on the topic of guns supposedly heading to Mexico. The paper noted:
“It is very difficult to purchase firearms in Mexico, and the Mexican government claims 90 percent of weapons it confiscates come from the U.S., the Post reports. (U.S. law enforcement agents — and gun lobbyists — claim the percentage is actually lower.)”
Why exactly is the counterpoint in parentheses? The use of parentheses is to enclose words or figures that clarify or are used as an aside, or to include material that you want de-emphasize or that wouldn’t normally fit into the flow of the text. By these grammar rules, it suggests that the editors are de-emphasizing the counterpoint argument (but should hardly come as a surprise – and yes, we’re doing this for effect).
WaPo Letter to the Editor is as Uninformed as Usual Editorials
Typically we don’t report on “letters to the editor,” but the recent letter from Eliot L. Engel to the editors of The Washington Post is no ordinary letter. Rep. Engel (D-N.Y.) is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcomittee on the Western Hemisphere, so it is essential that readers – and more importantly all voters – know his stance. Read more
WaPo Offers Yet Another Editorial That Suggests Mexico’s Problem Are All Because of American Guns
It isn’t the levels of government corruption, it isn’t the decades of ignoring the drug cartels, and it isn’t the ineffectiveness of the police and the army. No, according to The Washington Post, the problem of guns and “Shamefully, that is the United States.” Read more
WaPo Calls for Scrapping the ATF Reform and Firearms Modernization Act
In an editorial this week The Washington Post called for the bill, formally known as the ATF Reform and Firearms Modernization Act, to be “rewritten or scrapped altogether.” The paper argues that this act would make it impossible for the ATF to respond to gun dealers who break the law.
But we have to question if this is close to an accurate opinion. For one thing WaPo has remained one of the few mainstream media voices that continues to claim, “80 percent of guns used by Mexican cartels come from the United States.” This number has long been debunked, but WaPo cites it to make their case. Furthermore, WaPo’s editors note that the staunch anti-gun group Mayors Against Illegal Guns is also opposed to the bill. If the bill is distained by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino then we know it deserves another look.
