What The Huffington Post Misses In Its Anti-Gun Scare Piece

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson, File

The Huffington Post has one thing about it that I tend to respect. The outlet doesn’t pretend to be an unbiased news source. Not really. Everyone knows it’s liberal, which means we can generally read any article published knowing the ideological bias, kind of like how Bearing Arms is unapologetically biased in favor of the right to keep and bear arms.

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However, knowing the Huffington Post’s ideological bias doesn’t excuse it from trying to frame absolute BS as truth.

In a recent post, it presented a woman as the victim of an atrocity to advance the anti-gun narrative. The headline was “Fearing Her Husband, She Took His Guns To Police. They Arrested Her.

The goal is clear. Huffington Post wants you to view this woman as someone who feared for her life and decided to disarm her husband before he could kill her. On first blush, that’s something a lot of people–even some who support the Second Amendment–would understand. Except, there’s more to the story. It starts with:

An alleged victim of domestic violence in Florida was arrested and charged with armed burglary after she removed her estranged husband’s guns from his residence and brought them to a police department for safekeeping.

The case exemplifies the practical challenges of disarming domestic abusers, especially in a state like Florida where almost one-third of the population owns firearms.

However, there’s a problem with this.

You see, the woman crossed a line of her own.

According to court documents, she told the police officer on duty that her husband had been arrested the day before, and that she wanted to hand in his guns because she didn’t believe he would turn them in.

The police officer asked if she had taken her husband’s firearms without his permission. When she replied yes, he told her that she was confessing to a crime. Police arrested her and she was charged with armed burglary of a dwelling and grand theft of a firearm.

Lakeland Police Department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

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In other words, regardless of any wrongdoing on the part of the husband–and, to be fair, it sure sounds like there is as there was a protective order that forbade him from owning guns–that doesn’t excuse the wife of stealing the man’s property.

The woman’s lawyer is claiming that she didn’t take them for herself, but to give to the police, but I don’t see how that makes a difference, especially when you can consider there were allegations against the husband for domestic violence and a divorce in the works. If anything, it muddies the waters but doesn’t change the fact that she’s claiming to have stolen the man’s property.

Right now, all we have are allegations flying, but there’s another possibility here that might be worse than her stealing his gun.

Let’s not rule out that the firearm didn’t belong to the man in the first place. If she wanted to portray her soon-to-be-ex as violent and a threat, why not present a gun to the police that she says belongs to him. That could then be presented in court as evidence that he’d ignored the law and represented a threat to her.

At least, I could see someone trying to present it as such.

Regardless, in the Huffington Post‘s effort to attack Florida gun laws, it has taken the position of defending a woman who is either an admitted thief or a liar, all while maligning a man who stands only accused of being dangerous by someone with a vested interest in presenting him as such. Even for a biased publication, that’s rich.

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