The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York has a fine piece on how journalists, including news anchors like CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and Don Lemon, have become fierce advocates for gun control.
In his column Mr. York quotes Frank Sesno, a former CNN reporter and Washington bureau chief who is now director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, who said there should be a “media agenda” on guns to push the issue until government action becomes a reality. “The media themselves have a huge opportunity and power and responsibility to channel this,” Sesno told CNN’s Howard Kurtz. And the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg–an NRA critic who wrote an intelligent article on the case for more guns and more gun control–pointed out, ”Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever.”
A few thoughts on all this:
1. The elite media are more open in their advocacy than at any time I can recall. There are probably multiple reasons why, including the fact that Fox News has been so successful in breaking the previous liberal monopoly that existed in journalism. When there was no real counter-weight to ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, PBS, the Washington Post, the New York Times, et cetera, journalists were content to advance their worldview in more subtle ways–for example, through their story selection rather than out-and-out hortatory. But the “New Media,” which has injected new voices and different points of view into the public debate, seems to have convinced many journalists that something more is necessary. And so increasingly we see supposedly dispassionate anchors on supposedly neutral networks like CNN toss aside any pretense of objectivity. They are as political and dogmatic in their advocacy as the NRA is in its advocacy. It’s just the NRA has been more honest about its goals than progressive journalists.
2. What seems to be the animating passion of gun control advocates isn’t a solution to violence and mass killings; it’s moral posturing. They want to take advantage of massacres like the one we saw in Newtown to push an agenda that makes them feel morally superior. They want to act for the sake of acting. It doesn’t really matter to them which laws are most (and least) effective. They have decided that more gun control laws are needed and the NRA is malevolent, and they are determined not to allow any contrary evidence or thoughts to upset their settled ways.
An liberal academic sent me a note in response to a piece I wrote last week. Here is some of what he said:
you can cite all the studies you want until the cows come home, allowing people to have semi-automatic and automatic weapons is insane. What are you arguing for?? Even Joe Machin (sic) has suggested that we should hear from all sides on this and everything should be on the table. My God, those are our kids, your kids, my kids destroyed… slaughtered, wow, if we don’t count feelings on this it seem (sic) just plain strange. So, for now, no more of your rants on this… okay… right now, it feels offensive.
Set aside the obvious ignorance that characterizes this note (we don’t allow people to use automatic weapons, and from what I can tell my interlocutor doesn’t know what semi-automatic weapons are and do). Notice how this person dismisses out of hand serious studies by the Centers for Disease Control and the American Journal of Preventive Medicine which find that the evidence is insufficient to determine whether firearms laws are effective. My academic acquaintance is being overwhelmed by his emotions, including a deep hatred for the NRA and fury toward those who hold views different than his own. And anything that challenges his outlook “feels offensive.”
This outlook seems more and more pervasive among many journalists these days. Their “media agenda,” as Mr. Sesno says, is to “channel” the gun debate in a way that confirms their pre-existing biases. If they have to be anti-empirical in order to advance their cause, so be it.
This attitude–moral posturing, the demonization of political opponents, the epistemological closure–is certainly not exclusive to the left. But it is increasingly characteristic of it. And it makes a serious and informed discussion of the issues all that much harder to have. Which is perhaps what their true intent is. Many modern-day liberals may feel that a reasonable, calm, fact-based conversation is the greatest threat to their agenda. Which is why they so often generate more heat than light.
"This attitude–moral posturing, the demonization of political opponents, the epistemological closure–is certainly not exclusive to the left." n nNothing could be further from the truth. It is almost exclusively a lefty thing! Conservatives are obligated to acknowledge facts and somehow work them into their world view. No so with the doctrinal leftists. Facts are to be abandoned when they conflict with ideology.
“Nothing could be further from the truth.” n nI completely agree, Davidthomson1, but it seems that conservative journalists are more or less obliged to pepper their published commentary with such inane PC fillips, or they may be marginalized by the influential people inside the Beltway, and cut off from important contacts. n
Of course you could point out to Soledad the she seemingly has zero to say on the matter when she's endlessly posing about who is black, or more concisely, is there anyone left who's not, when we know black on black gun crime is practically the leading cause of black people dying at every age group up to age 60. Why is it that the community she has declared herself to be a representative of has been and continues to be left out. Perhaps all this ideology is spin and ratings and eyeballs and nothing else. But that would be terribly cynical and as we know, because they tell us, they're not cynical at all. Hmm, go figure.
I spent a rather painful holiday weekend here in liberal Marin trying to discuss gun control with my friends — a subject they initiated, because they said they wanted my views. (They actually wanted to shut down my views.) I finally figured out that, true to their Regressive nature, Progressives are so blinkered in their logic that they can only look at those who have died and then say, “They would not have died but for guns. Therefore if we get rid of guns, fewer people will die.” This tight logical universe repels data showing that gun deaths and violent crime increase with strict gun control. With their focus tightly on those who have died, they are incapable of acknowledging that legal guns mean more will live. I’ve developed this argument at greater length here, if anyone is interested: http://tinyurl.com/c22u7we
"Many modern-day liberals may feel that a reasonable, calm, fact-based conversation is the greatest threat to their agenda." n nTheir agenda? Would that be to disarm and subjugate America?
It seems nearly universal among pro-gun commentators to suppose that any passing appearance of failing to distinguish clearly between "automatic" and "semi- automatic" betrays a woeful ignorance of guns that renders opinions about them illegitimate. This is absurd and stupid. For one thing, semi-automatic handguns are still routinely referred to as "automatics" to distinguish them from revolvers, just as they were when Colt first introduced its .45 Automatic more than a century ago — so it's not as if the nomenclature was utterly clear. n nMore important, when people talk about self-loading, semi-automatic rifles fed by box magazines that can hold 10, 20, 30 or more rounds to fire before reloading, a process made quicker and easier with box magazines, they know perfectly well what they are talking about. They are talking about weapons that have far more firepower than other kinds of rifles that require manual action, bolt or pump, to chamber each bullet, are fed by other types of magazines, such as tubular magazines, that have a lower ammunition limit and take longer to reload. n nI should add that rifles of the former kind — the "civilian" AR-15 types — have substantially more fire power than the semi-automatic M-1, the US military's infantry rifle of WWII carried by millions of GIs and Marines into battle with the German and Japanese armies. The M-1 was loaded with an eight- nshot clip. Why that limit is not enough for today's sports shooters defies understanding. n nOne more thing: from Vietnam, when American infantrymen first carried the M-16 with its fully automatic capability to today, it is a rarity for US soldiers in battle to fire their rifkes on fully automatic, because it almost always is a waste of ammunition, which can be delivered more effectively through semi-automatic fire. While it is essential for our troops to have that fully automatic option, since their opponents typically are armed with Kalishnikovs, not much would change as a practical matter were they to use the supposed "civilian" AR-15. n nSerious dialog is a two way street. Dismissing gun control advocates as excessively emotional or simply ignorant is a non-starter.
The disdain is not triggered by "passing appearance[s] of failing to distinguish clearly between 'automatic' and 'semi-automatic'", but by blatant failures to so distinguish, usually in the form of calling weapons like the M4 Bushmaster "military-style assault weapons" (when, in fact, the German's invented the term "Assault" – "Sturm" – rifle precisely in order to distinguish a weapon capable of automatic fire from previous rifles that were not) in a disreputable attempt to mislead that in fact successfully resulted in 1994 in federal legislation that banned weapons on cosmetic grounds and is being used RIGHT NOW in an attempt to reinstate something very similar. If the gun control advocates who do this are not overly emotional and/or simply ignorant then they are lying in an attempt to appeal to the overly emotional and/or simply ignorant and until they stop serious dialog with them is what is a non-starter. n nI recognize that despite your misrepresentation of the state of affairs that you are in fact showing some knowledge of guns in arguing against semi-automatic rifles and 9+ -round magazines. But you are virtually unique in doing so. Similarly, our argument that the fact that some semi-automatic handguns are called Automatics has contributed confusion to the terminology is original but for that very reason unconvincing. n nYou are, btw, wrong about the use of the M-16 etc primarily in semi-automatic mode. Combat footage usually shows unaimed fully automatic fire, and this is consistent with the primary reason for the switch to that weapon, namely studies that showed a ridiculous fraction of soldiers in combat with non-automatic weapons did not fire them at all. And comparing the lethality of the Garand to the M-16 without noting that the latter fired a .30 cal round is quite misleading. I recall that the coroner reported that the first half-dozen deceased that he examined in the Newtown shooting had been shot 3-11 times each with the .223 round. Had Lanza used an M-1 he could have been just as lethal with far fewer rounds. With small children trapped in rooms as his target a bolt-action rifle or pump shotgun would probably have killed just as many. Are you planning to ban them too? n
Gun control advocates merit dismissal because they wish to deny others the right to defend themselves with the most effective means possible. n nFree people are entitled to defend themselves, up to and including use of deadly force in the face of imminent threats to their lives, and there is no legal limitation on the degree of deadliness of that force. In other words, I am not restricted by law to defending myself against an attacker armed with a baseball bat only with another baseball bat; if the attack poses an imminent threat to my life, I can use any manner of deadly force, and therefore any firearm. n nDefending against multiple attackers in a home invasion scenario, for example, would therefore legally merit and logically require a semi-automatic firearm.
I would like to know what else is on the liberal media's agenda?