Posted on 07/15/2011 11:29:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
No shame: The body count may be in the hundreds, and they still scratch the president's back.
“Smoking gun” emails and other recent revelations about “Operation Fast and Furious” — and other gunrunning operations by agencies of President Obama’s executive branch — have backed the mainstream media into a corner: they have been responding with silence or with outright deception.
One need look no further than CNN, where syndicated columnist (and PJMedia contributor) Ruben Navarrette Jr. delivered a whopper of a lie Thursday, claiming that the administration’s attempt to create rifle reporting requirements actually affects machine guns. He claimed:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has decided to try to clean up Dodge City by requiring gun dealers in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas to report bulk sales of automatic weapons.
He also wrote:
Do you remember the part of the Constitution where it says that people have the right to buy two or more automatic weapons within five days without law enforcement knowing anything about it? Me neither.
Automatic weapons were not among those being trafficked from American gun shops to Mexican cartels.
Not a single one.
They have been heavily regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934, and in the 77 years since that became the law of the land, machine guns like those you would find in a a few specialized gun shops have been used in just two illegal homicides.
In yet another unsigned editorial, the New York Times leads with the blatant fabrication that 70 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States. This is the most recent talking point created by Democrats, released just before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform heard testimony from ATF whistleblowers about Operation Fast and Furious in June.
The statistical misrepresentation is a variation of the 90 percent lie that the Obama administration has been using since the president was inaugurated. In actuality, 83 percent of guns used by the cartels come from somewhere other than the United States, and of the 17 percent traced to U.S. origins, roughly 8 percent were traced to U.S. gun shops.
Plus, we now know that a substantial portion of the weapons that transited gun shops did so as a direct result of federal law enforcement agencies telling dealers to make questionable sales to suspected cartel gun runners.
A fact the Times conveniently and purposefully ignores.
In addition to using debunked statistical lies, the Times tells Americans what they think the laws are — or rather, what they wish they were:
These guns have no legitimate place in civilian life and were banned outright for 10 years until Congress and two successive administrations failed to fight for the ban’s renewal.
That, too, is a series of blatant lies. A handful of specific guns were banned by name, but so-called assault weapons were never “banned outright.” In fact, sales of these firearms actually increased during the decade-long fiasco known as the “assault weapons ban.”
Despite what the grandstanding editors of the Times claim, AK and AR-pattern semi-automatic (self-loading firearms that fire one shot per trigger pull) rifles are extremely common, with the latter becoming known as modern sporting rifles and finding a home in practical shooting competitions, home defense, target shooting, and in hunting applications for nearly every kind of large and small game animal in North America.
The deceptive language used by administration champions in the media is hardly accidental. The disarming of the proles has long been a goal of the liberal elite that are the authors and audience of the various bi-coastal establishment news outlets, and they are more than willing to be duplicitous to manipulate their readers.
The Times editors presumably know little of firearms from firsthand experience, but are certainly intelligent enough to know the practical and academic differences between a military or law enforcement machine gun and a civilian rifle. They simply choose to conflate the two when it suits their attempt to influence the masses, and as we’ve shown above, they’re more than willing to fabricate when fudging the truth won’t do. Their peers have also demonstrated that they are more than willing to attack the messenger if they think they can get away with it.
Unfortunately for the administration, however, even the most loyal of media sycophants can’t cover a scandal as large as Gunwalker appears to be.
The public is too well-educated, the evidence of probable criminality too blatant and widespread. The administration’s apparent plan to use gun violence to spur support for gun control efforts has become Watergate with a body count, and no amount of media deception or spin, or party misdirection, can save them from the consequences of their actions.
Something I “just don’t understand.” There is a Pulitzer Prize sitting on a shelf somewhere looking for a recipient. If one single reporter decided to really go after any of the things we “vaguely hearing about” ... they would achieve real (and deserved) fame and fortune. Obama’s illegitimacy, Gunwalker ... any of these things. The stuff going on in this administration is a MOUNTAIN of material that someone could use to EXPOSE the whole mess .. or in this situation ... just pick a mess, they seem like cherries on a tree! But “they” would rather report the “Same ‘ol” and become mediocre rather than Pulitzer Prize-Winning Famous! Some of these folks need to read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and depart from the Breakfast flock. Why do they not see the opportunity, why do they not reach for it? So ripe for the picking, yet ignored. Amazing. There’s got to be at least ONE journalist out there that hasn’t been brain-dimmed by his/her college education.
Coincidence? Happenstance? You decide.
“Can somebody direct me to the part of the Constitution where it states that people DON’T have the right to buy multiple quantities of any type of arm without law enforcement knowing?”
On that note, show us the part of the Constitution where it states that the arms available for US citizens shall be inferior to the arms of our standing army? /s
Ain’t that the sad truth.
gnip
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.