The Washington Post has a funny way of defining “news.” It just keeps selling the same old story of shooting victims lobbying for gun control. On the front of Sunday’s paper, the headline was “Exposing their scares, hoping to rouse a silent nation.” That headline is simply wrong. The "silent" nation spoke, and liberal gun-control wishes lost.
But the Post’s Eli Saslow went back to the bitter victim-lobbyists wandering the country on a bus funded by Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns, who are now desperate to show graphic images of death and make Americans feel miserable:
“We have to make people understand what it feels like,” Barton told her.
“It has to make their skin crawl,” she said. “It needs to physically hurt.”
“Make them uncomfortable,” he agreed.
Their event in Washington on Thursday was the final stop of a 100-day summer bus tour: 25 rallies in 25 states organized by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, involving more than a hundred survivors who told their stories and showed their scars, hoping to inflame a country that they fear has gone numb....
“I’m learning that you have to be brutal with these people,” said Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away a magazine clip and disarmed the shooter at a 2011 event in Tucson where Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot. Maisch took out a picture she carried of the six people killed at that event and set it on the table. “Now I show this to people and start getting graphic,” she said. “This is not a pretty death like you see on ‘NCIS’ or ‘Law and Order.’ This is six people murdered on the sidewalk on a beautiful Arizona day.”
Second Amendment defenders were nowhere to be found in this article. Saslow could only channel the liberal view:
Now each shooting made [Virginia Tech shooting survivor Colin] Goddard “deflate,” he said, “like going back to square one.” Each new incident made him feel stuck in time: same gun laws, same public inertia, same predictable sense of disbelief, same calls from the same reporters who asked him to reiterate the same story of his own shooting, even though retelling it exhausted him. “You are constantly reliving it, and summoning the outrage, and that’s horrible but also the best chance to make it stop,” he said.
The Post article never considered whether the gun-control measures being pushed would have actually prevented shootings in Newtown or the Navy Yard. They keep topping the front page with “lost opportunities” and “red flags missed” in background checks. So why tout more background checks as a cure-all that a “numb” nation fails to support?
This promotion of Obama fans, however, is natural territory for Saslow, who wrote a book on ten people who wrote letters to President Obama and his responses.
