Guns

On Thursday's CBS This Morning, Major Garrett tried to shoehorn Steven Spielberg's screening of his recent film "Lincoln" for the Senate into his report on President Obama's Wednesday press conference on the fiscal cliff and gun control. Garrett hyped how the movie "celebrates presidential power and crafty legislative strategy," and that Obama "may need the wisdom of Lincoln for his latest legislative battle - gun control."

The correspondent even played a clip from the film about the sixteenth President to hint at a parallel between the passage the 13th Amendment, which happened after the carnage of the Civil War, and possible new firearms regulations in the wake of the Newtown, Connecticut massacre [audio available here; video below the jump]:

MSNBC’s Toure has reached a new low in his anti-gun crusade. Speaking on Thursday’s The Cycle, the co-host disgustingly said that the National Rifle Association would "want" shootings like the Newtown, Connecticut massacre of schoolchildren to happen for their benefit.

Toure’s perverse logic is that increased gun sales and NRA membership following the Newtown school shooting aids the gun organization: [Video after the jump; MP3 audio here.]

It seems apparent that NBC is following orders from The White House to continue to argue for stricter gun control in the wake of the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.  Appearing on Thursday morning's Today, NBC’s White House Correspondent Kristen Welker continued to peddle The White House message to “pledge action to prevent such a massacre from every happening again.”

Welker provided a one-sided segment in favor of President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s new gun control task force.  The segment was peppered with gun control advocates and White House talking points, with only one pro-gun quote sited throughout the entire segment. 

For ABC's Good Morning America, favoring more guns on the streets is "controversial" but President Obama's plea for gun control is simply news.

"Those who argue that the best way to stop mass killings is to have more guns in the right hands at the right time, even in the classroom. It's a controversial debate," reported co-host George Stephanopoulos on Thursday. In contrast, ABC's Jake Tapper framed the Newtown shooting as a "tipping point" amidst Obama's push for more gun control.

At his news conference on Wednesday, President Obama opened with a statement of over 1,100 words, all of it on gun violence, including his announcement that "I’ve asked the Vice President to lead an effort that includes members of my Cabinet and outside organizations to come up with a set of concrete proposals no later than January -- proposals that I then intend to push without delay."

That should reasonably have been expected to put the gun control issue to bed for the rest of the day. How many meaningful questions could reporters possibly pose after all of that (other than the one Jake Tapper of ABC asked, which will be seen later in the post)? But as Ben Sisario at the New York Times's Media Decoder blog reported Wednesday afternoon, that didn't satisfy many media critics, who -- with Sisario seeming to agree -- expected and wanted to see an all-gun-control, all-the-time exercise, and were angry that it didn't unfold that way (bolds are mine throughout this post):

It's often said that “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Apparently, that wasn't enough for Jeff Ross, host of “The Burn,” a 30-minute show that airs on the Comedy Central cable TV channel.

In the wake of a monstrous crime like a madman's mass murder of defenseless women and children at the Newtown, Conn., elementary school, the nation's attention is riveted on what could have been done to prevent such a massacre.

Luckily, some years ago, two famed economists, William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.

Bill Plante apparently couldn't be bothered to find more than one conservative/Republican for his report on Wednesday's CBS This Morning. Plante aired one soundbite from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, but followed it with three straight clips from liberals/gun control supporters - White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, the Brady Campaign's Dan Gross, and Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth, who attacked the NRA's leadership as "bullies".

The correspondent hyped supposed "public outrage over the massacre [that] has also emboldened members of Congress to challenge the power of the gun lobby." Plante also spotlighted the NRA's multi-million dollar lobbying campaign in 2012:

British CNN host Piers Morgan continued ranting about America's "gun problem" on Wednesday and claimed ownership of semi-automatic rifles has "nothing to do with the Second Amendment."

"And so you have to deal with the primary problem that America faces, which is guns. Guns. Guns. Guns. And it's nothing to do with the Second Amendment right to defend yourself, and everything to do with military-style weapons that could slaughter," he insisted. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

What a shock it's not -- liberal radio host Thom Hartmann responding to last week's unspeakable atrocity in Newtown by demanding redistribution of wealth.

That the rampage occurred in a leafy bedroom community in one of the most affluent states in the country has apparently eluded Hartmann, as has the fact that Connecticut is among the states with the most stringent gun laws. (audio clip after page break)

For the third day in a row, ABC's Good Morning America used the horrific Newtown tragedy to push its gun control agenda.  On Wednesday morning, both ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas and Pierre Thomas hyped that now is a "watershed moment" and a "tipping point" as stores halted sales of some guns and Democratic NRA member Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) considered changing his views on gun laws.

"Big-city mayors and one of the nation’s biggest police unions have called for a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity clips. And for some long-time allies of the gun lobby, this week was a tipping point," Thomas touted voices favoring gun control.  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

CNN's Piers Morgan has been on a rabid anti-gun rant since July's Aurora, Colorado, shootings that has gotten even more venomous after Friday's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

On Tuesday, he rudely and disgracefully tore into guest Larry Pratt, the Executive Director of Gun Owners of America, calling him "an unbelievably stupid man" who's "dangerous," concluding the interview by saying, "You shame your country" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Sunday's episode of The Chris Matthews Show featured an exchange between host Pete Williams and New York Times White House reporter Helene Cooper on President Obama pushing for stronger gun control legislation the day of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Cooper laid out the issue in emotional terms, suggesting people must choose between the protection of the Second Amendment and the safety of little kids at school. As if even a total repeal could ever guarantee that.

I'm in New England this week, and this afternoon caught Ann Coulter on the Howie Carr show.  She spoke of the amazing ignorance of liberals when it comes to firearms.  Just a couple of hours later, Chris Matthews provided a perfect case in point.

On this evening's Hardball, speaking with Illinois Dem Senator Dick Durbin, Matthews proposed that Congress "outlaw" semi-automatic weapons.  Does he not realize that doing so would render illegal virtually every hunting rifle in production?  View the video after the jump.

Liberals politicians and journalists are on a full-blown assault on the Second Amendment ever since Friday's horrific shooting in Newtown, Conn. Gun ban-pushers like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) are making the rounds in the media, including taxpayer-funded PBS. On December 17, NewsHour anchor Gwen Ifill gave Feinstein the floor to push her agenda. Naturally, Ifill failed to bring on an opposing point of view nor did she ask Feinstein tough questions.

At The Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz compares the gun debate to civil rights and the gay marriage issue. This despite his wanting the media to be "fair to all sides" on the issue.

After suggesting a "media agenda" on the gun issue, Kurtz notes "There was certainly a media agenda during the battle for civil rights in the late 1950s and 1960s. Television helped shine a spotlight on Alabama Gov. George Wallace and other Southern politicians who were fighting to preserve a segregationist society." Oh, so is the NRA the new George Wallace?

The hard-left gun abolitionists are feeling their oats lately. Buoyed by the president's reelection and his hinting strongly that he will pursue gun control legislation in the wake of the Newtown mass murder, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas offered yesterday "Some thoughts on the coming gun debate" which essentially boiled down to a call to make illegal a broad array of guns that are right now perfectly legal and used daily by law-abiding Americans to protect their homes: rifles and handguns that are semiautomatics with detachable magazines.

"[I]f I were the benevolent dictator of this country, I'd simply outlaw guns with magazines. That would leave plenty of guns for people to hunt with and defend their homes," Moulitsas insisted. Of course, banning all guns with magazines would instantly make Granny's 9 mm semiautomatic pistol illegal. Sure, she may opt for a revolver, but generally speaking that means she's going to have less rounds to work with in a home defense scenario, not to mention stronger kickback. But really, in Moulitsas's mind, if you are a gun owner, like the shooter's mom was, you were probably a paranoid freak who deserves to be shot:

On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Norah O'Donnell and Charlie Rose ganged up on former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel from the left. O'Donnell cited sources blaming Emanuel for the President's failure to push for stricter gun control during his first term. But neither anchor brought up the obvious subject: Chicago's high murder rate, and what that says about the big Democratic city's rigid anti-gun stance.

O'Donnell hounded the Chicago mayor for resisting Attorney General Eric Holder's liberal anti-gun agenda and over the Obama administration's apparent hesitance towards the controversial issue [audio available here; video below the jump]:

The New York Times continues to helpfully lay out a path for Obama to order up gun control legislation in the wake of the tragedy at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. Tuesday's lead story by Jennifer Steinhauer and Charlie Savage wasted no time in politicizing things: "Pro-Gun Democrats Signaling Openness to Limits; Town Starts the Mournful task of Saying Goodbye."

Demonstrating rapidly shifting attitudes toward gun control in the aftermath of a massacre in a Connecticut school, many pro-gun Congressional Democrats -- including Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader and a longstanding gun rights supporter -- signaled an openness Monday to new restrictions on guns.

There’s media bias – and then there’s just plain being unhinged.   MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts exhibited the latter in his interview this morning with Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) was egregious and irresponsible.  Roberts insisted that the United States has incredibly lax gun regulation while Kingston argued that mass shooting still happen in places where gun laws are stringent – namely in Europe.  In turn, Roberts sneered, “so, we need to just be complacent in the fact that we can send our children to school to be assassinated?”  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

“Americans trust their guns, not God,” and the gun lobby is sacrificing children to an ancient pagan god demanding child sacrifice. That’s the message of Washington Post ‘On Faith’ theological train-wreck Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite’s plea for gun control in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Thistlethwaite complained in a December 17 post: “It is becoming increasingly clear that Americans realize the unfettered flow of guns into our society is making us less free not more. These guns find their way far too easily into the hands of the mentally unstable and the school and mall-type massacres are increasingly the result. But these guns also circulate easily in cities like Chicago, and more carnage results. There are numerous deaths, including the deaths of children and young people, and they make horrifying statistics. Read this list of homicide victims, most of them from guns in Chicago, just from 2012. This must not be.” 

So our good friend Dan Joseph of our sister site MRCTV.org stopped by a pro-gun control demonstration in Washington, D.C., yesterday. As you might expect, he found some pretty dopey people spouting pretty dopey platitudes. The money shot, however, is at the tail end, where a helmet-haired bozo -- who earlier stepped on threatened to step on Joseph's foot cast, by the way -- admits that if you ban semiautomatic handguns that criminals will still get them, in which case, if you're a crime victim, "you're f***ed." [video follows page break; foul language warning]

In his Sunday appearance on "Meet the Press" (HT The Blaze), New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg answered host David Gregory's first question relating to the Sandy Hook massacre by saying that "It's so unbelievable, and it only happens in America." That statement is so obviously false that I would have expected even a Bloomberg- and gun control-sympathetic press, including Gregory himself, to point out how wrong that statement is. Nope: A search on Bloomberg's name at the Associated Press at 1:45 p.m. returned four relevant articles containing Bloomberg's name; none reports that statement, let alone its erroneous nature.

Further, a Google News search on [Bloomberg "only happens in America"] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets; sorted by date) returned 42 items, most of which were versions of a short, unbylined AP Sunday report containing the incorrect Bloomberg assertion. The AP clearly made it disappear in subsequent national site dispatches without identifying the statement's falsehood. To its credit, AP did issue a correction to an earlier "worst in U.S. history" statement in a different report:

During a segment on Monday's NBC Nightly News supposedly devoted to tackling the issue of mental health in the wake of the Newtown school shooting, NBC chief medical editor Nancy Snyderman instead used the opportunity to tout more anti-gun rhetoric: "One person who we spoke with....and I'm going to quote him, he says, 'It's easier to get an assault rifle today in the United States than it is to get adequate mental health care, and that's wrong.'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Snyderman followed the provocative statement by declaring: "And I think, speaking on behalf of parents like you and me and American citizens, you cannot disagree with that statement, Brian." Anchor Brian Williams replied: "That's a heck of a powerful quote."

On Tuesday's Good Morning America, anchor Elizabeth Vargas and reporter Pierre Thomas tag-teamed to push into overdrive their program's call for gun control legislation, giving their audience the idea that banning certain types of guns is the solution to preventing future mass murders like the Newtown, Conn., shooting last week.  For the second day in a row, ABC’s Thomas pushed the gun control narrative amplified throughout the liberal media.   

The segment began with anchor Vargas framing the topic in pro-gun restriction language, “we now turn to our ABC News ongoing commitment to the search for solutions to gun violence.”  Vargas then turned to ABC’s Pierre Thomas who for the second straight day pushed for stricter gun control. This time, Thomas turned his focus to outside the NRA's Fairfax, Virginia headquarters Monday he described, “An angry crowd.   Scores of activists protesting the gun lobby.”  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

On Monday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams was eager to seize on any perceived momentum for greater gun control in the wake of Friday's school shooting: "The President said he would use the power of his office to prevent more gun tragedies, and tonight he is being joined by a growing number of prominent voices."

In the report that followed, correspondent Tom Costello listed some of those voices. While pro-gun Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Mark Warner were noteworthy, Costello attempted to pad the list with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a longtime anti-gun activist. To create the appearance of bipartisanship, Costello even threw in MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who he pointed out was a "former Republican Congressman." On Thursday's Today, he went so far as to label Scarborough an "influential Republican."