Earlier today, I wrote about President Joe Biden’s plan to address violent crime in New York City. Biden is notoriously anti-Second Amendment, of course, so it’s no real surprise that all his focus is on guns.
Yet when the president does something, the media reports on it. That’s just kind of how things work and I don’t begrudge them for doing that job, especially on matters of policy.
When they swoon because he went to get ice cream, well, that’s a little different.
However, some reporters just can’t seem to not bring their own biases into the reporting, as we all know. Here’s a prime example from the Associated Press.
Illegal guns are flooding the streets. Teenagers are being murdered. And alarming numbers of police officers have been shot dead.
Gun violence already on the rise during the pandemic is spiking anew, and beleaguered cities are struggling with how to manage it. President Joe Biden visits one of them, New York, on Thursday as he tries to dispel criticism from the right that he hasn’t been tough enough on crime.
Biden will showcase federal, state and local efforts to get guns and repeat shooters off the streets. But there are limits to what the president can do when there is no appetite in Congress to pass gun legislation. The strongest effort in recent years failed, even after 20 children and six adults were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
So what the hell does Sandy Hook have to do with anything right now?
Nothing.
So why invoke it? Because they want people to “remember” that those who stood for the Second Amendment refused to do so even after kids were slaughtered.
They manage to leave out how the gunman killed his own mother and stole her guns, which is already a crime. They also managed to fail to note that this wasn’t even the worst school shooting in American history. That was Virginia Tech, which was carried out with a couple of handguns.
Of course, we know why that was left out.
See, if people realized there were legitimate reasons to question the anti-Second Amendment legislation proposed in the wake of Sandy Hook, they might decide to study the issue for themselves. Nuance doesn’t benefit those who want to take away our rights.
And that might make more people come to realize that the Second Amendment isn’t the problem some like to claim. Instead, it’s an important civil liberty more in need of protection than many others.
It’s also under attack by the one group of people who should understand how important constitutional protections actually are: The press.
Yet they don’t seem to get that.
Instead, they seek to undermine the Second Amendment with every opportunity by trying to pretend that black swan events like mass shootings should lead to horrific restrictions on our right to keep and bear arms.
Then again, we’re seeing members of the media call for restrictions on pretty much every other right you care to name as well. So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that they think nothing of manipulating a story to interject a horrific event that still shakes Americans to their core in an effort to shame people for not turning their back on the Second Amendment.
Because that’s really what this is all about.
We refused to bend the knee in 2012 and let them do what they wanted to do, so we must be shamed so that we’ll allow it to happen next time.
What they forget is that our Second Amendment rights exist as a bulwark against tyranny. We haven’t, which is why we’re not going anywhere no matter how many times they bring up Sandy Hook and try to shame us.
