It's a 2A Tuesday two-fer on today's Bearing Arms Cam & Co, with Grassroots NC's Paul Valone providing an update on the grassroots push for Constitutional Carry and SAF's Lee Williams joining the show to discuss the Washington Post winning a Pulitzer Prize for its 14-part attack on the AR-15.

Valone and GRNC declared today "Feedback Day" for House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, urging members to flood the lawmakers' offices with phone calls during a two-hour period on Tuesday morning to encourage them to take up a Constitutional Carry bill that's been stalled in the House for months. Valone says this is the next step after delivering about 7,000 petitions to Berger's office on the first day of the session, and the group isn't going to give up on its quest to make North Carolina the 30th Constitutional Carry state in the nation. 

"We needed to shift the paradigm from one where people expected the bill to die to one where it's understood that we're going to keep pushing for this thing, and we know perfectly well that there are manipulations of the rules that will keep this bill alive. So, the paradigm shift was first, and we've been dropping emails into their offices, and now Feedback Day is the next means by which we turn up the heat." 

Berger infamously stated last year that after Republicans repealed the state's permit-to-purchase law he wasn't sure there was a "need" to tackle any more 2A issues like Constitutional Carry, but after he had thousands of petitions delivered to his doorstep, he told reporters that it was a topic he was willing to discuss with lawmakers. Valone says legislators need to be reminded that, without the support of North Carolina gun owners, the GOP wouldn't enjoy its current veto-proof majority, and he wants to see that majority put to good use to strengthen our right to keep and bear arms. 

Today's second interview takes on the Washington Post's advocacy aimed at infringing on that right, and the accolades it's received for doing so. On Monday, the Post won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its 14-part series on the AR-15; one that featured bloody crime scene images amidst thousands of words of anti-gun activism that was designed to spur lawmakers and the public to support a gun ban. The Post reporting squarely lays the blame for mass shootings on the AR-15 and other semi-automatic rifles, even though the paper's reporters noted in the fine print that most mass shootings involve handguns, not semi-automatic rifles. 

"I've never seen photos like they used in a daily newspaper," Lee Williams told me. Williams spent decades working for papers large and small and says that the anti-gun bias in the newsrooms he's sat in is nothing new, but the Post series took it to a whole new level. 

"The photos that they used were so over the top, so salacious, so disgusting. They abandoned all journalistic principles just to try to malign the AR," he continued. "This whole concept of a debate is ludicrous. The debate ended for me in 1789. There is no national debate. There should not be. This is the most common rifle right now in existence." 

Which, of course, is one of the "problems" that the WaPo series was meant to address. I ran across a panel discussion with several of the reporters who worked on the series that took place earlier this year, and while they claimed at times not to be advocating for a particular position, they couldn't help but let their bias be known with comments like these. 

"Shouldn't everyone see this if it's happening in our country because of the laws that our country has put in place? Is this something that, as a public service, people deserve to know?" 

"Our goal was to do something different to push the bounds of journalistic norms and try to change the public conversation." 

"The question we began with was, is there something else we can do? I mean, we're not here to advocate for a particular position, but we did feel that there were... That there was a phenomenon happening in this country that wasn't fully understood. People didn't understand why it was happening, the causes or the consequences. And that's our job to expose the consequences and to explain the causes. And so that was what we wanted to do. We also wanted to identify where the public policy debate stood. Were there possible solutions to the violence? 

Semi-automatic rifles are not the "cause" of mass shootings and banning them isn't a solution, but not according to WaPo. Though the series never comes right out and explicitly states that active shooting attacks would cease if AR-15s and other modern sporting rifles were banned, that's the implication that runs throughout the series; the guns are why these shootings are taking place, and if you want to see them stopped, you've got to go after so-called "assault weapons."

This is not only a false narrative that's offensive to our fundamental civil rights and our ability to protect ourselves from the monsters in our midst. It's a distraction from doing the things that really do work to stop these kinds of shootings; improving access to mental health, behavioral threat analysis, increasing physical security, and ensuring consequences when violent crimes are committed, to name just a few. 

It's not exactly a shock that the Washington Post would be rewarded for its efforts with a Pulitzer, but it does once again reveal what we're up against as gun owners and Second Amendment supporters. Between the anti-gun bias of the legacy media and the Big Tech censorship that's taking place on a daily basis, it's become more important than ever to support the work of reporters and journalists who aren't afraid to stand up for our rights or advocate for policies that can protect the public safety without trampling on our freedoms. 

I hope you'll check out the conversations with Paul Valone and Lee Williams in the video window below, but I also encourage you to support the independent, pro-2A reporting we're doing here at Bearing Arms by becoming a VIP or VIP Gold member. If you use the promo code SAVEAMERICA, you can get 50% off your VIP or VIP Gold membership! You'll get exclusive reporting, an ad-free experience, and the ability to comment on stories, but you'll also be playing a crucially important role in ensuring that our voices aren't silenced and we can continue to bring the truth to a debate that, as Williams says, should have been over centuries ago.