American taxpayers help fund PBS. We don’t pay for all of it, but a non-trivial sum of tax dollars go to the network. Any attempt to cut that funding is met with consternation. “How dare you cut funding to [insert innocuous PBS show here]!”

They ignore that this is a network that continually pushes an agenda. Part of that agenda is gun control, and they’re not even really trying to hide it.

On Friday’s Amanpour & Co., fill-in host Sara Sidner devoted a segment to promoting the agenda of a gun control advocate and made no serious effort to challenge her liberal guest’s claims.

In the pre-recorded interview with Dr. Joseph Safran which aired on PBS and CNN International, Sidner promoted such misinformation as claiming that mass shootings are “uniquely American,” and she also overstated the number of mass killings in 2022.

Sidner misleadingly began the segment:

2022 will go down as the second highest year for mass shootings in the United States on record. That means more than 600 mass killings in the past 12 months alone, according to data compiled by the nongovernmental organization, Gun Violence Archive. The shootings come at a disturbing pace, often too fast to grasp — people going about their day suddenly gunned down in schools, supermarkets, night clubs, movie theaters, in the streets, you name it.

She soon added: “Are these tragedies preventable? And why can’t we stop this uniquely American problem?”

But, according to the website she cited, there have been 36 cases of gun-related “mass murder” in 2022, which would also include killings in private residences in addition to public places. Additionally, there are certainly plenty of other countries where homicide numbers are high.

On the subject of mass shootings in public places, Europe has had a worse problem than the U.S., which, unlike the U.S., has even included fully automatic machine gun attacks.

In other words, this isn’t a “uniquely American problem” and it never has been. We just think that because we tend to be far more focused on what’s happening here than elsewhere in the world. I mean, sure, we know that Ukraine and Russia are at war, but do we know who the major opposition members are in Belgium?

Not so much.

So, we focus on American mass shootings because they’re closer to home, then delude ourselves into thinking that these kinds of things just don’t happen anywhere else.

We’ve seen numerous mass shootings outside of American borders. Thailand, for example, or Russia. Those are just two right off the top of my head, and I don’t see all such shootings by any stretch of the imagination.

The idea that this is a “uniquely American problem” needs to be challenged, but PBS didn’t. They advanced it. They present it uncritically as if this is so self-evident that it doesn’t require challenge.

Yet it does. It’s not a factual statement, and the fact that it’s treated as such is a big chunk of why we can’t solve the issue.

If people acknowledged that these shootings were far from unusual in places like Europe, they’d be forced to face the facts that gun control isn’t an answer. They’d have to look elsewhere for a solution, and that could be difficult and potentially messy.

So, they blame guns, pretend it isn’t happening in other places, and get PBS to help push that agenda.

Well, this is why some of us want to cut off taxpayer funding for them. You want to keep them afloat? Then you pay for it. I’m sick of it.