"In Grim Ritual, Barack Obama Again Calls for Stricter Gun Control After Mass Shooting," blares the headline for a Wall Street Journal Washington Wire blog post by Byron Tau filed early Wednesday evening. In the story itself, Tau relays Obama's gun-control talking points from his latest interview, recorded Wednesday afternoon after news of the deadly San Bernardino mass shooting.
Here's an excerpt:
In what has become a ritual in the aftermath of a mass shooting, President Barack Obama repeated his call for stricter gun control laws after another deadly attack on Wednesday, this one in San Bernardino, Calif.
“We have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world,” Mr. Obama told CBS News in an interview taped Wednesday.
[...]
Speaking to CBS on Wednesday, Mr. Obama said that people on the government’s anti-terrorism no-fly list were allowed to purchase weapons.
“Those same people who we don’t allow to fly could go into a store right now in the U.S. and buy a firearm and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them. That’s a law that needs to be changed,” Mr. Obama said.
At no point did Tau find any one to offer a rebuttal to Mr. Obama's talking points, such as his "mostly false" -- according to PolitiFact -- talking point about mass shootings being unique to America and his tired talking point about the terrorism watch list which conflates mere suspicion of terrorist ties with the sort of due process requisite for depriving an American citizen of his constitutional liberties, in this case the liberty to keep and bear arms.
