Greg Gutfeld is an absolute riot. He's not a comedian, but a trained journalist, yet his show is easily funnier than most of his late-night competition. Then again, the only other one who isn't catering to a leftist crowd is Jimmy Fallon.
Yet despite being hilarious, he's also smart, and he took a jab at the media in a way that applies a great deal to the gun debate.
See, the story he was responding to had to do with anxiety in schools due to Trump's immigration reforms. That's not what we talk about here, except as it may apply to guns or crime, but that's also not what I wanted to talk about in the first place.
Here's what Gutfeld said:
step one: foment anxiety.
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) February 19, 2025
step two: report on the anxiety.
step three: pretend you didn't cause the anxiety
step four: wonder why everyone hates the media https://t.co/vqR1kUJxi1
Now, this is an interesting progression he lays out, and I know it's completely accurate.
How do I know this?
Because I've seen something much like it time and time again.
Look at "ghost guns" for example. Making your own guns has been legal in this country since we were a colonial holding of the British Crown. Anyone with the know-how could build a firearm without interference from the authorities even under English rule. When we won our freedom, we continued the practice.
But then the media heard about "ghost guns," a scary term for something that had been long legal.
They started reporting on the threat posed by these firearms, even though they were incredibly rare at crime scenes, and in the process likely informed the criminals that this was an option. Coupled with the growing popularity of the 3D printer, it created a situation where people who were oblivious to this "loophole" suddenly knew about it thanks to the media.
Some started making their own guns, or making them to sell to criminals.
Then the media starts reporting on the "growing numbers" showing up at crime scenes, often failing to provide any context with which people could evaluate the threat for themselves.
But in the process, they created more and more opportunities for people to learn not just that they could do it, but how to do it.
They essentially created the problem they then reported on like they had no role in perpetuating the issue.
We've also seen it with school shootings.
See, mass murders at our schools aren't common by any stretch of the imagination. They happen more often than anyone should be comfortable with, but the odds of any given person being at a school where one occurs is really pretty small. The odds of them being harmed at such an incident is even smaller.
But the media "reports" on these things, citing K-12 School Shooting Database and the Gun Violence Archive--two sites that trip over themselves to inflate the number of "shootings" to make the problem seem worse--and act as if it's just a matter of time before our young people experience a mass shooting.
Kids and parents see this, either by following the news or just watching their social media feeds, and then start feeling a sense of anxiety because they often don't understand the odds.
The media then reports on the anxiety, acting as if they had no role in creating that anxiety.
Over and over again, we've seen this play out. The media, which once at least pretended to be neutral, perpetuates the problem, making the anxiety of it worse, often through poor reporting of the facts, then reports on that aspect as if it's just the natural evolution of the issue and not them making everything seem worse.
Frankly, I'm sick of it.
