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.]
Wednesday's episode provides a classic example of how CNN treats gun rights advocates versus gun control advocates. The network features the most controversial pro-gun rights statements and then openly mocks them on-air. CNN rarely, if ever, highlights controversial statements by liberals and de-constructs their errors.
Scottie Hughes, the news director of the Tea Party News Network who had lost her brother to gun violence, went on Tuesday's Piers Morgan Tonight and defended ownership of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle:
"Tomorrow we have 19 executive orders coming down. I want to say that's a tyrannical government, but it kind of sounds like they're mandates. In the last six years we have actually had natural disasters where police have cleared out of those cities, and the people that had the weapons were safe. We don't know what's going to happen."
Of all the arguments against gun control made on Tuesday's Piers Morgan Tonight, O'Brien played that one the next morning, noted that such arguments are "not infrequent," and ridiculed it:
"That woman who was just talking from Piers Morgan's show last night, you hear that not infrequently, this sense of 'I have Second Amendment rights, the government might come to get me, and if I have to use it to protect myself against my government'. I mean, some of that is starting to sound a little bit nutty to me."
O'Brien then asked her Democratic guest how to deal with such nonsense. "How do you be the voice of calm, as you've said you want to be, when the debate is like that?" she posed.
Such insolence by CNN's liberal anchors echoes the gun control crusade that some CNN hosts – namely Piers Morgan – have taken up in the last month. For instance, Morgan smeared Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America as "an unbelievably stupid man" who is "dangerous."
O'Brien herself, shortly after the Newtown shooting, expressed her liberal astonishment at author John Lott's arguments for more guns: "Your position completely boggles me, honestly. I just do not understand it," she lectured him.
On December 21, Morgan and CNN colleague Ali Velshi made their true feelings known during an NRA press conference. Morgan cast the organization's agenda as "murderous" and Velshi scoffed at the press conference as "one of the more amazing press conferences I've ever seen."
Last Thursday, Morgan smeared guest Larry Pratt some more, telling him he never sees any "sense of humanity" from him when debating guns.
And last week while losing a gun debate to conservative Ben Shapiro, Morgan resorted to insults. "You brandish your little book," he sneered at Shapiro, referring to his guest's copy of the Constitution.
