Guns

Weird stuff.  Then again, we are talking about Jim Moran.  Appearing on Al Sharpton's MSNBC show this evening, the Dem Congressman from Virginia declared that "older white guys" were "the most insecure component of our society."  Added Moran, possibly alluding to the difficulties in adopting additional gun control measures, "we're much the problem with these kind of things."

Joan Walsh was there to support the self-doubting Moran.  "There are a lot of terrific older white guys out there," reassured Walsh, naming Moran and Vice-President Biden among them.  View the video after the jump.

Instead of holding the White House accountable, CNN's White House correspondent is helping the President make his case for gun control.

Jessica Yellin touted Obama's "persuasive advocates," young children who wrote letters to the White House pushing for stricter gun laws whom the President featured behind him as he pushed for more gun control on Wednesday. Yellin teed them up to explain why they wrote their letters. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

In a contentious exchange with Eric Pratt of Gun Owners of America on her Wednesday MSNBC show, host Andrea Mitchell declared that Constitutional rights, like the right to bear arms, were more like suggestions: "Well, they can be infringed, because the First Amendment is infringed, I have to obey all sorts of regulations from the FCC, there are things we can't say in a crowded theater, so every right also carries with it responsibilities and obligations." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

That was in response to Pratt explaining: "...a very important concept of inalienable rights, because whether it's the right to vote, right to sit behind a microphone, or the right to choose how I'm going to protect myself, all those rights cannot be infringed, as the Second Amendment says."

Liberal Daily Beast writer Michael Tomasky joined the gang of other liberal journalists expressing their overwrought, melodramatic outrage this morning at the NRA's latest Web ad which calls President Obama to task for dismissing their call for armed guards in the nation's schools.

But, being Tomasky, he had to crank the amp up to 11, suggesting that the ad was darkly coded in a way that might inspire violence against the president's daughters (emphasis mine):

The gun industry can’t do anything right … at least, that’s what the average citizen would think if they paid attention to the media. On Jan. 15, the Associated Press even attacked a gun industry trade show.

That same day, the annual Shooting Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show opened in Las Vegas.  Only a limited number of media credentials were allowed in the show – if you consider 2,000 credentials to be “limited.” According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the show expects one in 30 attendees to be press. Yet the AP complained the “show was closed to the public and was covered by a limited number of reporters and photographers.”

As MediaBistro's TVNewser blog noticed on Wednesday, an image of NBC Meet the Press moderator David Gregory was featured in the newly released ad by the National Rifle Association, labeling him to be one of several "elitist hypocrites" on the gun control issue. [Watch video of the ad after the jump]

CNN host and gun control advocate Piers Morgan kept smearing gun rights advocates after President Obama announced his proposals on guns Wednesday. CNN's Wolf Blitzer was interviewing a GOP Texas state representative, who had proposed a bill that could make a felony any enforcement of a federal ban on semi-automatic guns or magazines within the state of Texas.

"Texas Republican congressman Steve Toth on CNN right now is everything that's wrong with America re guns. A stupid, dangerous man," Morgan ranted on Twitter. Blitzer interviewed Toth shortly after Obama's announcement and had tough questions for him, but didn't resort to name calling like Morgan did from his Twitter account.

What a surprise that the ladies of The View are outraged over a new NRA commercial that addresses President Obama’s hypocrisy over having armed guards in schools across America.  Discussing the ad on Wednesday, January 16, the women of The View had some harsh words for the "sick" NRA spot.

After playing the ad, the entire cast expressed outrage, furiously talking over one another in a rush to bash the NRA as “nuts." Host Barbara Walters claimed to be particularly offended at the reference to President Obama’s two daughters in the advertisement, failing to point out the true message the NRA was arguing.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

Bob Schieffer somehow topped Chris Matthews during CBS News's special coverage of President Obama's gun control press conference on Wednesday, as he became the worst caricature of a foaming-at-the-mouth cheerleader for the chief executive. Schieffer lauded "one of the best speeches I've ever heard him [Obama] deliver", and compared Obama's  new gun control agenda to Lyndon Johnson's push for civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

The CBS veteran even went so far to liken the President's cause to the ten-year hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden and the difficult endeavor of winning World War II [audio available here; video below the jump]:

Liberal Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy is no stranger to NewsBusters criticism, but today he merits positive attention for going against the liberal grain on a policy issue: gun control.

While various liberals and some civil rights movement veterans have expressed outrage at the January 19 Gun Appreciation Day celebration -- noting its proximity to the federal observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- Milloy noted in his January 16 column the role that guns played in protecting civil rights activists in the 1960s (emphases mine):

CNN continued its trend of marginalizing gun rights advocates on Wednesday. Anchor Soledad O'Brien derided a CNN guest who had cited her fear of tyrannical government as reason to own a semi-automatic rifle.

"Some people make your head hurt when they speak. Wow. And that was one of those moments," O'Brien sneered in front of Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth (Ill.). [Video below the break. Audio here.]

At the top of Wednesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer hyperventilated over a newly released ad from the National Rifle Association pointing out the hypocrisy of President Obama on gun control: "Getting personal. The National Rifle Association out with a powerful new ad this morning, bringing the President's family into the gun debate." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

The ad in question simply noted that Obama's daughters were protected in school by armed guards while the President was pushing for gun restrictions. Introducing a report on the ad, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed that it "gets very personal." Chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd followed: "...the NRA is signaling it intends to fight the President, and it's using this new web video that hits close to home, targeting his daughters."

The journalists at Good Morning America on Wednesday howled with outrage over a new ad by the National Rifle Association, deriding the commercial as a "vicious," "harsh" and "personal" attack on Barack Obama. The just-released spot wonders why the President isn't more supportive of armed guards in schools, pointing out that his daughters attend are protected with such security.

White House correspondent Jon Karl railed, "And in a sign of just how tough this fight will be, the NRA is greeting the President's announcement this morning with a harsh, personal attack on the President." The reporter complained, "The NRA video viciously attacks the President." Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos echoed, "Very tough, very personal video. It even invokes the President's children." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Have a look at the screengrab: it shows Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, she holding chin in hand, he hanging head.  Their melodramatic reactions come in response to an NRA ad decrying the hypocrisy of political and media elites who want "gun free zones" in the schools where most Americans send their children, while sending their own children to schools with armed guards.

The panel's reaction was one of collective hyperventilation.  Mike Barnicle called the ad "political pornography."  Donny Deutsch said it's "one of the grossest things I've ever seen in my life."  Scarborough asked Mika "what's wrong with these people?" Brzezinski replied that some of the people running the NRA are "sick in the head" and that she is "embarrassed for our country."  But what of the substantive point made by the ad?  View the video, including the ad, after the jump.

Being publicly identified as to whether or not you are a gun owner is fine for thee but not me.

That is the attitude of many newspaper editors and journalists  as was revealed in a video produced by Project Veritas. Here is the Project Veritas explanation of what happened:

Posing as "Citizens Against Senseless Violence," we visit the homes of journalists working for Westchester Journal News, MSNBC, and the Star-Ledger. We also visited the home of Eric Holder. None will take our signs that say "THIS HOME IS PROUDLY GUN FREE."

As news outlets, notably MSNBC, CBS, and CNN, all tout gun control, it’s hard not to accuse these news outlets of exploiting tragedy to promote a left-wing political agenda when a new Washington Post/ ABC News poll shows that gun control isn’t a top political priority with the American people. 

Examining the results of a new Washington Post poll, the Post's Chris Cilizza in his The Fix blog noted today that Americans believe the national debt and the federal government's chronic deficit spending are greater issues than gun regulation.  In fact, only 28 percent of Americans, including a paltry 41 percent of Democrats, feel the gun control issue requires urgent attention:

Central liberal tenet -- in lieu of a solid argument, resort to rhetorical hyperventilation.

As you'd expected given the host's default toward bellicosity, two guests on Ed Schultz's radio show yesterday climbed over the top in shabby attempts to smear the National Rifle Association for the thought crime of defending a constitutional right. (audio clips after page break)

Leftist radio host Mike Malloy is aghast at the notion of a "Gun Appreciation Day" to be celebrated by 2nd Amendment supporters on January 19 this year.  On his January 14 radio program, Malloy attacked the "right wingers who want to see blood in the streets, the Hannitys, the Limbaughs, they want the killing to start. Glenn Beck would like nothing more!" 

A few minutes later, Malloy attacked the "crazy bastards" behind Gun Appreciation Day.   "I know, let's have Bomb Appreciation Day.... How do you do something like this?!" Of course, Malloy has repeatedly fantasized about the violent death or maiming of those with whom he disagrees politically or religiously. Here are just a few examples:

Commemorating the one month anniversary of the Newtown shooting, CNN stacked its Monday line-up with gun control advocates and Democratic politicians.

Over the course of the entire day, CNN interviewed guests about the gun issue. 13 guests were gun control advocates, including five Democratic politicians. Only two Republican guests went on to oppose further gun control measures or defend the NRA's proposal for armed guards in schools.

Updated: The National Rifle Association did NOT commission the app in question. James Joyner of OTB explains. | "Just weeks after the National Rifle Association forcefully blamed violent video games for gun violence, the gun-rights organization has released a new shooter game for kids as young as four," Andrew Mach complained in a January 15 story at NBCNews.com. "The game's launch comes one month after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which touched off a national debate over how to limit gun violence," he added.

The implication, of course, is that the NRA is hypocritical and ghoulish with its January 14 release of the iPhone/iPad NRA: Practice Range app. And the age 4+ appropriateness rating is just icing on the cake. But an objective journalist might actually take a look into how Apple approves apps and assigns ratings, as well as how long it takes for an app to clear through its internal approval process. Mach failed to consider those things, so I looked into it.

The Lower Hudson Valley's Journal News based in White Plains, New York has been very tight-lipped since it published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple reports that the paper has hired "a Manhattan public relations, marketing and government affairs firm" whose job appears to involve denying interview requests and issuing "no comment" statements.

Predictably, the one media outlet which has been granted access by the Journal News is the New York Times, whose Christine Haughney filed a report on January 6. In that dispatch, she quoted Dwight R. Worley, the "tax reporter" who cooked up the idea of publishing the map, putting forth the following defense of his handiwork: "The people have as much of a right to know who owns guns in their communities as gun owners have to own weapons." How disingenuous, as will be seen after the jump.

It's obvious that the people working for CNN consider supporters of gun control to be calm and rational while gun rights proponents are hostile and wild-eyed.

The cable news network provided proof of this viewpoint when it posted only half of weeknight host Piers Morgan's debate with Breitbart.com editor Ben Shapiro but provided the entire wild interview with Alex Jones, the Austin, Texas, man who started an online petition to deport Morgan back to his native England because of his attacks on the Second Amendment.

Maybe the sanest words out of any media member's mouth in the weeks following the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, came from actor Rob Lowe on CNN's Piers Morgan Tonight Monday.

"I’m no social anthropologist, but I do think that the last thing viewers want is another Hollywood actor telling them anything about guns pro or con" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

One month after the Newtown shooting, CNN "commemorated" the atrocity by hosting a string of gun control activists and Democratic politicians pushing for stricter gun laws.

From the 5 a.m. through the 3 p.m. news hours, CNN hosted five guests who had participated in the "Demand a Plan" campaign put on by the anti-gun group Mayors Against Illegal Guns. In addition, two Democratic congressmen and one Democratic senator appeared on the network and pushed for more gun laws. Only one Republican made an appearance to argue to the contrary.

On his January 10 program, pro-gun control Hardball host Chris Matthews was utterly perplexed at the very notion of gun shows themselves, going further than the call to close the so-called gun show loophole regarding background checks. " I'm a suburbanite city mouse. I generally have lived in urban -- suburban areas, but I don`t know why you need a gun show. I mean, if you want to buy a gun, you buy a car, you go to a dealer. Why do you have to have a show?" Matthews griped.

Well, now it turns out that Matthews's employer, NBC Universal, is actually sponsoring a massive three-day-long gun show in Las Vegas. The Washington Free Beacon's C.J. Ciaramella reported shortly after 6 p.m. Eastern on Friday:

It seems as though MSNBC’s Ed Schultz has taken Rahm Emanuel’s belief that, “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste” to heart.  Speaking on Monday prior to President Obama’s final press conference of his first term, Schultz disgustingly suggested that the tragedy at Sandy Hook could be "the 9/11 of gun violence."

Schultz, along with the rest of MSNBC have been on a gun control tirade since Sandy Hook, and used President Obama’s press conference to disgustingly use a tragedy for political purposes:

CNN's Carol Costello helped a Democratic congressman tout his new bill on Monday that allows victims of gun violence to sue the gun industry. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) is aiming to repeal a 2005 bill passed by a Republican Congress that protected gun makers and dealers from such lawsuits.

Instead of asking hard questions of Schiff's proposal, Costello spoonfed him this liberal talking point: "Ted Kennedy said this law was bought and paid for by the NRA. In your mind, what was the intent behind this law?" [Video below the break. Audio here.]