Back in October, I covered a Gallup poll that showed the majority of Americans don’t support a handgun ban. At the time, only 27% of Americans said they would support such a ban. Two studies covered by Legal Insurrection later that month revealed that the Obama Administration’s renewed push for stricter controls and limited carry actually runs contrary to the social science of controlling violence and keeping people safe.
The thing is, you’d never know it with the way the mainstream media covers issues like gun control, urban violence, and the Second Amendment.
The scope and tragedy of deaths due to gun violence aren’t just fodder for “very special episodes” of shows like Dateline—they’re chum in the water for an opportunistic media determined to forward the interests of anti-gun, pro-regulation activists. Case in point: in the wake of the Umpqua Community College shooting in Rosebud, Oregon, the New York Times unleashed an apparent expose on Sheriff John Hanlin, drawing out his past, pro-gun thought crimes and using them to turn the conversation away from mental illness and toward the Brady Campaign’s push for Hanlin’s firing—and a strict, anti-gun agenda.
We saw it coming from a mile away, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. We as conservatives have learned not to trust the media when it comes to reporting on guns—which is what makes this next video so refreshing.
Atlanta-area journalist Ben Swann has committed a cardinal sin: he looked directly into the camera and defended the Second Amendment.
The choicest bits, via the transcript:
This may be a very foreign concept, but the first fight over the Second Amendment wasn’t over whether the population should be armed. All the framers agreed with that. The fight was between federalists and anti-federalists over whether we would have a standing army.The Anti-federalists―among them George Mason, Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams―were militant advocates of the inclusion of a bill of rights in the Constitution because they did not trust the power of the federal government to be restrained.Don Kates, a scholar of the constitution and Second Amendment, points out that, “During the ratification debate, the Federalists vehemently denied that the federal government would have the power to infringe freedom of expression, religion, and other basic rights—expressly including the right to arms. In this context, Madison secured ratification by his commitment to support and to safeguard the fundamental rights that all agreed should never be infringed.”In short, the federalists—including men like John Jay, James Madison and George Washington—wanted the Second Amendment because they believed a strong federal government would be able to control a standing army.And the anti-federalists wanted it because it would mean every able-bodied man in America would be armed in the event that the federal government or America’s own standing army turned on its own people.I told you it’s a hard truth. And that is what you need to know.The Second Amendment is not about hunting, or even just defense of your own home. It was written by men who ultimately believed that governments and armies would turn on their own people.The Second Amendment was written to guarantee that would never happen.
The primal scream you just heard came from the #gunsense activist hashtag.
I’m for hard truths. I’m for telling people what they need to know, even when it’s not politically correct, or comforting, or in step with what our emotions tell us is right.
More of this, please.
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