Guns

During his Monday afternoon show, MSNBC host Martin Bashir initiated a segment by reporting on the tragic shootings that took place over Father’s Day weekend in Chicago. Over the holiday weekend a total of 41 people were shot, 7 fatally. Bashir wasted no time politicizing these tragedies by using them as evidence that the “conversation is not over” on pushing new gun control legislation in Congress. He then went on to shamelessly advertise for Vice President Joe Biden’s White House event to support gun-restricting legislation as well as the No More Names bus tour which is a project paid for by Major Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns group to try to drum-up popular support for anti-gun legislation. [Link to the audio here]

It is curious that Bashir would use Chicago gun violence as an example of why there needs to be universal background checks prior to the purchase of legal firearms. Amid his own claims that the NRA was endorsing a “program of disinformation” and promulgating the “spreading of falsehood and lies” by “suggesting that there was going to be a registry for gun owners,” it seems that Bashir must not have done his homework to choose Chicago as his example for this platform.

Odds are that the ultraliberal, Occupy movement-supporting crowd in Portland, Oregon, which includes its mayor in late 2011, who told the Los Angeles Times that "I support a lot of what the movement stands for, as a political leader" -- are already trying to figure out how to stop what they surely see as a dangerous idea which has sprung up about 10 miles to the south: fed-up citizens arming themselves.

Portland is among several localities in the Beaver State which "have banned loaded firearms in all public places." That's apparently not the case in an unincorporated area of Clackamas County near the suburb of Milwaukie, where a fed-up woman is forming a "Glock Block" that Portland's OregonLive.com web site, based on a search on "Glock" returning no relevant results, is ignoring, despite the national attention the group has begun to receive. Portland TV station KOIN has the following story (HT to Zero Hedge):

Craig Melvin typified MSNBC’s stance on abortion Tuesday morning. Filling in for Thomas Roberts as the anchor of MSNBC Live, Melvin conducted a rabid attack-dog interview with Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) about an abortion bill before the House of Representatives that would ban abortion after 20 weeks with a few exceptions, such as rape and incest. Minutes later, Melvin brought on hard-left abortionist Irin Carmon from Salon.com for a gooey softball interview which served as a platform for Carmon to rip into Blackburn's stance on the bill.

Melvin was ticked off that this abortion bill, proposed by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), only allows exceptions for rape and incest when those crimes are reported. He condescended to Blackburn: “Congresswoman, do you know how many cases of rape and incest go unreported in this country every year?” [Video below the break.]

The host of a new CNN series Inside Man wants stricter gun laws. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock aired his opinions on Monday night's Piers Morgan Live after discussing his upcoming show which will document his time working at a Virginia gun shop. The series debuts June 23.

Spurlock wants to see "universal background checks," a limit on magazines, and a database for the mentally ill so they can't purchase guns. "People aren't tracked. There's no way to kind of know who those people are and really keep the firearms out of their hands," Spurlock told Piers Morgan. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

CNN's Piers Morgan pushed for "federal gun control" and defended the "nanny state" on his Monday night show. CNN has no qualms showcasing such an outspoken liberal on its prime-time programming.

"Isn't he right to be a nanny?" Morgan said of New York Mayor Bloomberg's large soda ban. "People need nannying."  He also excused Chicago's strict gun laws that fail to stop gun crime, instead blaming neighboring states with lax gun laws. "So until you have a federal gun control that stops that happening, this will keep happening in places like Chicago," the CNN host said of gun violence. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Far-left college professor and political commentator Marc Lamont Hill has been spending too much time around CNN host Piers Morgan. Yesterday on Twitter, Hill said he was "bothered" that President Barack Obama had released a photo of himself engaging in a watergun fight with his youngest daughter as a tribute to Father's Day.

"Was anyone else bothered by the Father's Day picture released by the White House yesterday? The one with the President holding a water gun?" Hill Tweeted.

A GOP candidate for the Connecticut State Legislature's 53rd District about 70 miles northeast of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown won election on Tuesday, marking the first time the seat has gone to a Republican since Richard Nixon was president.

Republican Samuel Belsito defeated Democrat Anthony J. Horn by a 58.5%-41.5% margin, largely because his stances in support of citizens' Second Amendment rights and fiscal restraint were more convincing. Based on a review of Newsday's Associated Press Connecticut feed carrying stories from throughout the Nutmeg State (most June 11 and June 12 stories as of the time of this post are here and here), it appears that the AP did not run any stories on the result, and almost certainly made no attempt to discern its meaning.

Cole Sear from The Sixth Sense sees dead people, and Joe Scarborough, like pretty much everyone else at MSNBC, sees racism. That’s just the way it is. On Friday, the Morning Joe crew was chatting about a recent NRA attack ad against Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) when Scarborough took issue with the image of President Obama shown briefly in the ad:

"[P]eople called me up and said, what do you think of, do you think that they may have shaded that ad to make Barack Obama look more ominous and black?"
 

You should wait at least as long before buying a gun as before killing a baby – if HuffPo contributors Jan Diehm and Katy Hall had their way, that is. It’s an outrage to them that there are more waiting periods for abortions than there are for guns. 

Diehm and Hall posted a piece today complaining that more states require you to wait before having an abortion than before buying a gun. Using an infographic map, the article touted that 26 states have a waiting period for abortion, as opposed to 11 that require wait periods for firearms purchases. Fifteen states apparently have neither.

According to Chris Matthews, pro-Second Amendment Americans are weird, not "normal," "obsessed" and probably racist. In a segment on Thursday's Hardball, the cable host played a new National Rifle Association ad attacking Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. Matthews lectured, "The gun people, they think about nothing else. And they never change their minds, never change their attitudes and never change the frickin' subject."

Talking to fellow liberal Ron Reagan, the anchor mocked, "How do you keep an interest among normal people that keeps up with that intense, almost, well, obsession that the gun people have?" Unsurprisingly, Matthews jumped to tarring pro-gun-rights Americans as racist. The new NRA commercial features clips of Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama. The MSNBC host judged, "Ron, do you think there might be a soupcon of ethnic gaming in this, the pictures they put in there? Obama and Bloomberg?"

CNN's Piers Morgan will use any and every tragedy to bolster his crusade for gun control in the U.S. On his Tuesday night show he hounded George Zimmerman's brother Robert, Jr. over George carrying a gun the night Trayvon Martin died. Morgan also pushed for an age 25-and-under gun ban.

"Obviously, if George had not had a gun on him that night, the distinct likelihood is that Trayvon Martin would still be alive. Does he regret now carrying a gun around like that, do you think?" Morgan asked Zimmerman. "Do you regret that he had?" The trial of Zimmerman has only just begun. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Sunday's Washington Post seemed to arrive about two months late with a dominating front-page story on mourning Newtown parents Mark and Jackie Barden. Much of the Eli Saslow story was a heart-breaking account about the aftermath of their son Daniel's death in the grade-school rampage.

But the Post also wanted to drive home the anger that Newtown did not create a gun-control victory for Obama and the Bardens, as Mark introduced the president on April 17, when Obama called it a "pretty shameful day" that the gun-rights advocates had won. "Gun culture was extreme," Barden thought, and it couldn't be moderated.

The specter of school shootings has brought a too-typical staple to local newspaper sections: the boys disciplined at (or suspended from) grade school for bringing a toy gun or anything resembling a gun.

The Washington Post just found the latest wild overreaction, from Calvert County, Maryland, a blue state that’s cracked down on gun rights. “A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school,” according to the family.

"Poll Finds Support Slumping for Health Law," blares the top headline on page A4 of Thursday's edition of the Wall Street Journal. "Americans' unease with President Barack Obama's health-care law has intensified," staff writers Patrick O'Connor and Louise Radnofsky noted, and that "just as the administration is gearing up to persuade people to sign up for some of its major provisions" according to a poll commissioned by the Journal and NBC News.

Among other things the poll found "the number calling [ObamaCare] a bad idea reached a high of 49%... with 43% 'strongly' holding that view" and double the number of poll respondents (38 percent to 19 percent) believing they will prove "worse off" under ObamaCare's implementation rather than "better off." Sure enough, however, NBC News elected to leave out those damning statistics from Thursday's edition of the Today morning show program.

Yet another famous Hollywood face is pushing for gun control. “I cannot understand the people who are against some form of gun control,” insisted legendary actor Kirk Douglas on the Huffington Post yesterday.

“America’s cowboy days are over,” wrote the 96-year-old Douglas. Mentioning that “some crazy fan” had given him an engraved gun, Douglas, who often played cowboys, announced unhappily that America has “become a cowboy country with too many guns.”

Meet your new late-night CNN host George Stroumboulopoulos, who feels the Toronto Mayor's alleged use of a gay slur was worse than if he had a crack addiction, and thinks New York City Mayor Bloomberg is a "right-winger" whose soda ban revealed that his "heart's in the right place" and whose support for "marriage equality" was "fantastic."

Stroumboulopoulos, currently a nightly CBC television host, will host a weekly talk show debuting on Sunday night June 9 and airing on Friday nights at 11 p.m. ET. CNN announced his show would focus on a variety of issues from sports to pop culture to politics. In an interview with HuffPost Live published on June 3rd, he revealed his beliefs on multiple issues including legalization of pot, guns, gay marriage, and current politicians.

As NewsBusters reported Monday, in direct response to schlockumentary filmmaker Michael Moore's request that the pictures of the slaughtered Newtown, Connecticut, kids be released, family members of the victims have filed a petition for a law to be passed in their state to prevent this from happening.

Feeling the heat, Moore told The Hollywood Reporter hours ago, "I’m not calling for the release of these photos, for Christ's sake."

Apparently being a liberal is cool nowadays, at least in Chuck Todd's view.

On Monday NBC's chief White House correspondent and host of MSNBC's The Daily Rundown eulogized longtime Democratic New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg as a groundbreaker who advanced liberal ideas like gun control long before it was "cool" to be for them.

So Slate’s Justin Peters had a nice “squirrel” piece yesterday about gun “accidents," wherein he sought to use a rash of recent gun accidents involving young children as a news peg to push for more stringent gun control on the state level.

With five scandals plaguing the Obama administration, you would think that a Washington Post affiliated site would be drilling down on Eric Holder’s possible perjury about the seizure of phone records and emails of journalists.  That’s a story that hits close to home for any journalist. Yet, Peters decided to apply the defibrillator paddles to the gun meme. In a way you have to admire the left-wing media's persistence.

Friday's CBS This Morning touted Oprah Winfrey's recent Harvard commencement speech, airing over a minute of half of footage from the former daytime TV host's address. The morning newscast spotlighted how Winfrey took the opportunity to promote two liberal pet causes: gun control and "a clear path to citizenship" for illegal immigrants.

The show's three anchors all sang the billionaire's praises. Charlie Rose gushed over Winfrey's "remarkable speech". Norah O'Donnell trumpeted the TV star's "important message". Gayle King, who is Oprah's longtime friend, marveled over the address: "She did a great job yesterday." The three hosts didn't once mention King's close connection to Winfrey [audio clips available here; video below the jump].

Add this to the seemingly endless list of things which would be considered news and denounced far and wide if a Republican or conservative were involved.

In early February, the Politico's Tarini Parti and Kenneth P. Vogel noted the insistence on its "About" page by Organizing For Action, the non-profit 501(c)(4) successor to Organizing for America, President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, that it "be involved in any way in elections or partisan political activity." That didn't last long. In fact, the quoted language is no longer on OFA's "About" page. Instead, OFA now exists, despite growing evidence that a mountain of information which could have swung the election to Obama's opponent was deliberately kept from the public, "to support President Obama in achieving enactment of the national agenda Americans voted for on Election Day 2012." Accordingly, OFA has no compunction over sending its members emails from Obama himself.

On his Thursday show, CNN's Piers Morgan compared the NRA's Wayne LaPierre to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and drew parallels between the current gun debate and the civil rights and drunk driving debates of decades ago.

When guest Margaret Hoover described America's "gun culture," Morgan interjected, "There was a racist culture, there was a drunk-driving culture." Even liberal Marc Lamont Hill was taken aback. "A Southern gun owner is not like a Klan member. I mean, come on," he admonished Morgan, who claimed "I'm not saying they are." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

The hosts and analysts on MSNBC sunk to a new low on Friday, trashing the late Charlton Heston as somehow responsible for attempted ricin attacks on Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama. After Now anchor Alex Wagner read excerpts from letters allegedly written by the man responsible for the poisonous mailings, guest David Corn snarled, "When you were quoting the letters that were sent, I was thinking, it sounds like Charlton Heston wrote these." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Speaking of the National Rifle Association, Corn impugned, "It doesn't surprise me that some unhinged individuals out there start to take [NRA speeches] literally and believe that now is the time to rebel and to strike out with violent means."

On Wednesday's The Last Word show, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell tried to link rhetoric by NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre to the ricin attack on New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as he played several clips of LaPierre criticizing the liberal mayor's support for gun control before getting to the story of ricin-tainted letters. After running the clips, O'Donnell ominously related:

CNN's Piers Morgan tried to resurrect his desperate push for gun control on Wednesday's Piers Morgan Live. Morgan spat on the NRA and bullied author Wayne Allen Root for joining the organization.

"You joined the NRA after Sandy Hook. Why would anybody do that?" Morgan challenged Root. He also defended Britain's handgun ban: "And guess what, we don't get anybody shot dead in Britain! We have about 30 to 40 murders with guns a year. That's the whole point of banning guns!" [Video below the break. Audio here.]

On her Monday show, CNN's Christiane Amanpour celebrated the same "Catholic" Salon.com writer who penned the revolting piece, "So What If Abortion Ends Life?" and who shuddered at an Olympic gold medalist being "so, so, so into Jesus."

Salon.com's Mary Elizabeth Williams is a "pro-choice, liberal Catholic," and Amanpour hyped her "fight" to change the Catholic Church – allowing women to be ordained to the priesthood and thus treated as "equal citizens." Apparently Catholic women are second-class citizens in Amanpour's book.

MSNBC anchors have itching for fresh federal gun control legislation long before the Newtown shooting last December, but the network went into overdrive with the push and hasn't looked back. Although the president's push for gun control is on the administration's back burner at the moment, the network is still feverishly seeking to keep gun control at the forefront of the national discussion, even and especially if it means using kids as props to do so.  

Take Thomas Roberts, who on the May 24 edition of his 11 a.m. MSNBC Live program interviewed 7-year old Myles Nelson who imaginatively "came up with an idea for using chocolate bullets instead of real ones in the aftermath of the Newtown shooting." 

When a major journalist breaks a gun law in the nation's capital on national TV in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers at home, you'd think it would be pretty much an open-and-shut case to prosecute. But when Meet the Press host David Gregory did just that last December -- displaying on-air an empty 30-round magazine during an interview segment with the NRA's Wayne LaPierre -- he got off scot-free when the District of Columbia failed to prosecute. The relevant law on the books in the nation's capital calls for a $1,000 fine and a year in prison for any civilian who possesses a ammunition magazine that can hold more than 10 rounds.

Two months later, annoyed with the District of Columbia for failing to answer her questions pertaining to the case, pro-gun rights opinion columnist Emily Miller of the Washington Times filed a freedom of information request. On Friday, Miller updated readers by noting how the District has been stringing her and other conservative bloggers along when it came to producing documents related to the Gregory investigation (emphasis mine):