Posted on 01/04/2013 5:02:27 PM PST by Kaslin
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
That statement, from NRA president Wayne LaPierre, was immediately turned into a laugh line by the press, deemed everything from deadly spin to delusional to paranoid. The New York Daily News proclaimed that anti-gun cranksoops, I mean mental health expertswho had never met LaPierre had diagnosed him as crazy.
As someone who went to journalism school and has worked in media for years, Im used to this. Left-leaning editors and reporters declare what everyone knows and everyone thinks, while pretending to be objective. Their preferred method of slanting the news is covering stories that bolster their worldview while completely ignoring others. Because whether the good guy is a police officer or a private citizen, LaPierres statement is absolutely trueand several incidents ignored by the media prove it.
Two days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a San Antonio man burst into the Mayan 14 movie theater and began shooting, sending panicked moviegoers rushing to exits and ducking for cover, according to MySanAntonio.com. But instead of becoming the next James Holmes, the suspect was shot by an off-duty cop. Unlike the Aurora theater shooting, the incident ended with only two woundedthanks to a good guy with a gun.
How many of you have heard the name Mayan 14 before today? Is it any surprise that a network like CNN, which employs Piers Morgan, let this story slip under the radar?
When most Americans hear school shooting, they think Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook. Theyre all incidents where the gunmen took a dozen lives or more. We rarely think of Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Pearl, Mississippi; or the Appalachian School of Law. Why? School shootings there were all halted by good guys with guns. They also had dramatically lower death tollsone, two, and three, respectively.
At the Appalachian School of Law, the gunman was tackled by three men, two of whom had rushed to their cars to retrieve their guns. The media covered the storybut selectively edited the details.
"What is so remarkable is that out of 280 separate news stories in the week after the event, just four stories mentioned that the students who stopped the attack had guns, wrote economist John Lott in his book More Guns, Less Crime. "In the other public school shootings where citizens with guns have stopped attacks, rarely do more than one percent of the news stories mention that citizens with guns stopped the attacks."
The media deemed LaPierres good guys with guns line as a delusion of wannabe cowboys everywhere, who fantasize about Wild West-style shootouts with cartoon villains. Maybe they should go back and read one of my favorite Townhall columns of all time: Chicks Carrying Guns and Kicking Tail by Mary Katharine Ham.
Hams examples arent fantasies or hypotheticals. Theyre true stories of women who chased away thugs, rapists and thieves with guns. The potential victims included elderly women and a pregnant mother of two, who shot an armed gunman who kicked in her door. A woman named Charmaine Dunbar was accosted by a rifle-toting gunman and shot him twice with her handgun. It turned out he was a suspect in six sexual assaults in her area.
As Ham put it, This is the kind of womens empowerment that gets me going.
The mainstream media might have a bigger audience and more influence, but the conservative media should refuse to ignore these stories and countless others. Instead of letting the anti-gun camp control the debate, lets turn Mayan 14 into a household name.
Need a “like” button!
Pick an issue: Sandy Hook and guns. Run a reasonably financed national ad campaign briefly on the alphabets (and major cable ) Reinforce much less expensively thereafter on the internet. Make the point of the Mayan 14 as described in the article., and pointedly shiv the media at the same time for their biased coverage of the issue.
Make our point far and wide, and undermine the liberal media. Repeat as the budget crisis reaches decision time. Repeat when Republicans are accused of a war on women. Repeat Benghazi. Repeat debt ceiling. Repeat taxes.
Finance it with contributions from us and every soul fed up with the crap we've seen for 4 years; the Heritage Foundation type organizations, NRO, NRA, Weekly Standard, Newt's Solutions group, the RNC, Sherman Adelson types, Mitt Romney, Steve Wynn. Hot button issues would likely raise lots of cash .
A couple million bucks judicially spent could begun to raise the awareness of the low information voter, which, IMHO, is the goal. Prominent exposure would certainly ignite a media debate which we could then win armed with facts.
Costs money and aggravation, and I don't know if works. First the folks who are SUPPOSED to be selling them the adds oppose the ads, then try to put up countering ads. Also, liberals are great vandals and will destroy the ads where possible.
>> That statement, from NRA president Wayne LaPierre bla bla bla
Would that be the same LaPierre that, along with his NRA, endorsed the piece of putrescent excrement aka Harry Reid in his last senate race?
None of my weapons would be used for assault. They would be used for a kick-ass defense against one or many attackers.
I am "Pro-Choice" in the caliber, magazine capacity, and style of hand grips.
I am "Pro-Life" in the protection of my life and and the life of my loved ones.
The Second Amendment was not written for hunting.
The armed citizen is necessary when seconds count and help is minutes away.
Three days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School... 46 more innocent lives were taken in Connecticut.
Four days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School... 46 more innocent lives were taken in Connecticut.
Five days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School... 46 more innocent lives were taken in Connecticut.
Six days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School... 46 more innocent lives were taken in Connecticut.
Seven days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School... 46 more innocent lives were taken in Connecticut.
CHOICE: it's the law of the land.
In 2008, 17,030 women obtained abortions in Connecticut
NO!!!
Buy the MEDIA, instead!
NO!!!Media ad buys may be a tactic to explore.
Buy the MEDIA, instead!
Impractical.As I keep insisting, when conservatives speak of the media, they have unwittingly already surrendered. Because anyone who gives the matter serious thought knows that you cannot censor fiction, and you can only make yourself look foolish trying to even speak as if you thought you could. Therefore the only sensible approach is to look to legal remedies for nonfiction. And in general, conservatives will almost never be seriously concerned by nonfiction books. The nonfiction book format is natually conducive to argumentation in depth about an issue - and in-depth treatment of an issue is normally going to be reasonably favorable to conservatives. And even when that is not the case ( see, for example. An Inconvenient Truth) , the book may get undue attention and promotion from journalism - but that is a separate issue.
The problem is not the media, the problem is objective journalism.
Until we can all stand up on our hind legs and say that, we will get nowhere. But how can we say we are against objectivity? We arent - far from it. But we are and logically must be opposed to objective journalism.
What is the distinction? What do the quote marks mean? Are they scare quotes? Yes - but they are also regular quotes. Because no one can know that they are actually objective. That being the case, anyone who claims to actually be objective is boasting of a virtue that they cannot know that they have. And, that being the case, anyone who claims to be objective - or who belongs to an organization which claims objectivity for them - is not objective about themselves.
In order to attempt objectivity, it is necessary to be open about any motives or interests which might cause you to not be objective. This, the one who claims actually to be objective cannot do; it is a logical inconsistency. It follows that anyone who claims the virtue of objectivity is not even trying - at least not in any conceivably effectual way - to be objective. Whoever knows that he is objective knows that anyone whose perspective differs from his own is wrong. Thus, such a person lacks the ability to give a full and fair exposition of the opposing viewpoint; he will inevitably create instead a straw man which is easily destroyed by the right opposing view.
This pseudo-objvetivity reveals itself time and again in such things as the deletion of the very meaningful dialog between the the police dispatchers question as to the cause of Zimmermans suspicion of Martin, and Zimmermans answer (Hes black) to the subsequent, unambiguously different, question as to Martins racial identity. Zimmerman is suing NBC over that, a decision which I applaud. The problem has been that most people do not take that path. The Duke Lacrosse team members should have sued all of journalism.
And here is the other salient point: it is entirely reasonable and logical to speak of journalism as a single, unified entity. There are many members of the Associated Press, and they are independent pro forma - but they are in constant communication with each other,every hour of every day. And as Adam Smith pointed out in 1776,
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices."The reason that the MSM functions as a single entity is that each member of the Associated Press needs to stay in good graces with the whole of the Associated Press - with the result that ideological competition is excluded. That doesnt mean that none of them profess conservative editorial page opinions - but it does mean that self-promoting Wolf! crying is the order of the day on the objective front page of every one of them.
Then we're done for.
If we do NOT get a balance BACK into the channels of information that feeds the masses that vote; then it's over.
Schools, media, intertainment, were ALL bought by the left.
The other choice is to fight, and that will NOT be pretty!
Ah!
You've simplified it!
We merely have to buy the AP!
You took the words out of my mouth. Word for word, I swear n
Ah!...entity is that each member of the Associated Press needs to stay in good graces with the whole of the Associated Press.
You've simplified it!
We merely have to buy the AP!
Will Rodgers once said that he had come up with the solution to the submarine menace - boil the oceans.Unless youve got Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in your pocket, we dont begin to have the money - and the owners wouldnt sell for any price, even then. Theyre true believers!! Its illogical, I know - but there it is.
There is IMHO only one conceivable remedy - sue their socks off, and they would not have the authority to refuse to sell. But the thing is, I dont want to rule the AP, I want to ruin it! Its very existence is an anachronism (in that its justification is to economize on the transmission of news over long distances, and - compared to the founding era of the AP in the middle of the Nineteenth Century - bandwidth is free), and by its very existence it has the pernicious effects of causing an unconscionable concentration of propaganda power.Understand, the AP has a history which includes being found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But its isnt the AP specifically which is the problem; any wire service would have the same incentives and therefore in the long run would have the same effects. The idea of the wire service is the problem. Because the idea of the wire service is the idea of unlimited cooperation of all journalists - the idea of ideological - specifically socialist ideological - conformity. Journalism defaults to socialist ideology as the sparks fly upwards, for the simple reason that journalism defaults to cheap criticism - crying Wolf! - as a way of attracting attention and promoting itself. And that is what socialism is. Everything else about socialism is window dressing.
BTTT! Thanks.
LaPierre endorsed Harry POS Reid? What a totalitarian bootlicker. Thanks. I did not know that. Kind of like when I heard Art Laffer on FOX happily stating that he voted for Bill Clinton twice. Makes you want to puke...on them.
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