Free Republic

Thanks to conservative new media, the Kermit Gosnell trial is finally part of the national dialog. But before the mainstream press got around to doing their job, ten congressmen took to the floor of the House to protest the lack of media attention being paid to the horrifying story. One such congressman, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), contrasted the abortionist's trial to another ongoing narrative that the media covers obsessively: gun control. “If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing,” said Smith, a...

The gay son of Rep. Matt Salmon, Arizona Republican, told KPNX-TV in Phoenix on Sunday that both MSNBC’s “The Last Word With Lawrence O'Donnell” and CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live” canceled interviews with him because he refused to attack his father on the air. Matt R. Salmon, the son, said MSNBC canceled his appearance because “they had intended to be critical of him and … I was unwilling to do so.” He also said CNN “seemed very gung ho about” an interview at first, but when he said he was supportive of his father, “they seemed to lose interest.”

(CNN) -- On the evening of March 19, Tom Clements, the director of Colorado's prison system, was shot and killed when he answered the door of his home near Colorado Springs. The slaying sparked a police chase that ended a few days later in Texas, with authorities finally killing the suspect, 28-year-old Evan Ebel, in a shootout. It was soon discovered that Ebel had been part of a violent white supremacist gang during the eight years he spent in Colorado prisons. Clements was the latest victim of increasingly active violent right-wing extremists. While American politicians and the U.S. public continue...

On this Sunday's "Meet the Press," guest-host Chuck Todd was interviewing Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) about the current status of the Senate's gun legislation, specifically what is being called the "Universal Background Check" which Democrats and their media counterparts favor as a "common-sense measure" in reaction to the Newton murders a few months ago. Forget the fact that a background check would have had absolutely no impact on Newtown, or Aurora, or Tucson, or Columbine, or Virginia Tech, or any other high-profile crime; progressives are bound and determined to use these massacres to slowly whittle away at Americans' constitutionally protected,...

Over at the Washington Post, two “researchers and consultants on social and political issues” argue that American mass shooters are overwhelmingly white males, and that therefore the opinions of white males on what to do about mass shootings should be discounted.They are correct that the demographics of mass shooters are interesting — certainly, mass shooters differ from other murderers (and from the general population) in various ways. But mass shooters are not as overwhelmingly white as the authors imply, and the conclusions they draw are utterly bizarre.Frankly, the authors don’t seem to have a very good grasp of the...

Is the mainstream media biased against gun owners? You bet it is. Are gun owners aware of this fact? Yes. Do we care? I suspect most of us don’t. At this point, it’s pretty much expected. With that said, we do get irked from time to time at the media’s portrayal of gun owners, which frequently hews to the narrative that we’re all a bunch of paranoid zealots, blood-thirsty and pernicious, who horde supplies and hideout in subterranean bunkers awaiting a zombie apocalypse. Naw, that might be overstating it. It’s probably more accurate to say that the media propagates or...

Washington DC - -(Ammoland.com)- National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) president Steve Sanetti is warning gun owners to be beware the mainstream media’s efforts to pit one gun rights group against another in an attempt to divide and conquer. For example, Sanetti points out that a March 5 Washington Post article is constructed around the theory that the NSSF does not stand with the NRA in opposition to universal background checks. The WAPO does this by equating the NSSF’s support for improvements to the current background check system with support for universal background checks. Sanetti rejects this argument out of hand,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — District of Columbia prosecutors received scores of emails from citizens upset because NBC television journalist David Gregory was not criminally charged for displaying a high-capacity ammunition magazine on his "Meet the Press" show. Prosecutors received roughly 50 emails demanding that Gregory be charged, plus more than 150 others expressing outrage in the days after officials decided to not prosecute him. The Associated Press obtained the messages through a public records request. The emails were sent by people from around the country, including some self-identified gun owners and Second Amendment supporters, who accused prosecutors of hypocritically and unevenly...

(CNN) - Question: What do George Clooney, Chaka Khan, the American Medical Association, Bon Jovi and C. Everett Koop have in common? Answer: They are among the 500 names on the National Rifle Association's absurd new "enemies list." Richard Nixon would be embarrassed to find that his once sinister form of score-keeping has been revived so promiscuously by the NRA. But there is some redeeming social value here: The list illustrates an organization that has become hermetically sealed from society at large, so caught up in conservative debates that it has forgotten how to connect with Main Street America. The...

This morning, many in the media went all in with a sanctimonious attack against gun-rights supporters who they accused of heckling Neil Heslin, the parent of a 6-year old boy murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre. The only problem is that it was all a lie. Mr. Heslin was not heckled. If you look at the full, unedited tape (which was first obtained by Twitchy), you'll see that after 15 minutes of the audience remaining respectfully silent as Mr. Heslin spoke out against assault weapons, he then turns to ask the audience a direct question: I ask if there’s anybody...

The Lower Hudson Valley's Journal News based in White Plains, New York has been very tight-lipped since it published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple reports that the paper has hired "a Manhattan public relations, marketing and government affairs firm" whose job appears to involve denying interview requests and issuing "no comment" statements. Predictably, the one media outlet which has been granted access by the Journal News is the New York Times, whose Christine Haughney filed a report on January 6. In that dispatch,...

At least two burglars broke into a house in White Plains, New York, on Saturday and headed straight for the gun safe. This address and the owner's name, registered on a permit for legally held firearms, had been published on the controversial gun map published by the Journal News on December 23. The burglars couldn't open the safe and the property owner wasn't home. But this incident has led to speculation that the map is now being used by criminals for targeted gun theft.

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Aw, darn it! Obama is trying so hard. The regime is trying so hard. They never worked harder trying to overcome all of the messes left by George W. Bush, and here we are. We're on the verge of a recovery! The unemployment situation (they keep telling us) is improving. Even though we added people to the unemployment rolls yesterday, that was called "stability" by the AP. We're still at 375,000 unemployment applications every week, but we're on the verge -- we're on the verge! -- of overcoming the big mess left by George W. Bush and,...

“You come in here, brandish your little book as if I don’t know what’s in there--” “My little book? That’s the Constitution of the United States. It’s our founding document, Piers.” “I know what’s in your Constitution.” “Do you really?” That was the climax of a heated debate between Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro and CNN’s Piers Morgan on live television this evening--one in which Morgan came off much the worse for wear. Shapiro began by pointing out that for weeks, Morgan had bullied guests who defend the right to bear arms by "standing on the graves of the children...

The way the media branch of the government salivates over shootings, you would think another theater shooting not long after Aurora would be big news, especially if it offered the added excitement of beginning in a nearby restaurant before moving into the theater. Yet we never heard much about last month’s Mayan Palace 14 shootings in San Antonio, in which two innocents were wounded. Detective Louis Antu, spokesman for the Bexar County Sherriff’s Office, said the shooting began at a nearby China Garden and “carried on into the theater.” At one point, the suspect fired at a San Antonio Police...

Shocked journalists this afternoon were quick to react to the Drudge Report’s controversial header photo comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin. The item linked to a Weekly Standard article reporting that President Obama was willing to address the gun issue with an executive order. “Hitler and Stalin!” exclaimed BuzzFeed Editor Ben Smith on Twitter alerting most of his followers by linking directly to the Drudge Report. “Drudge rules our world,” responded Slate journalist David Weigel to Smith’s post on Twitter, later adding sarcastically, “SOMETHING SHOCKING HAS BEEN POSTED ON THE INTERNET.” “Our right is nuttier than your right (US...

The NBC, ABC, and CBS morning shows on Monday all touted President Obama seemingly calling for more gun control during a Sunday night vigil for the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. NBC's Today provided the most hype as correspondent Lester Holt proclaimed: "While he offered words of comfort, he also laid down a political gauntlet....sketching the outlines of what amounted to a policy statement on gun violence." Holt acknowledged: "He did not utter the words 'gun control,' but his message could set the stage for such a debate." Speaking to co-host Savannah Guthrie later on the broadcast, Holt...

Amid all its political correctness and ideological distortion, one thing often overlooked concerning the mainstream media is its essential strangeness, its near-total separation from any behavior, attitudes, or ideas that could be defined as "normal". We find yet another example of this in the treatment of Adam Lanza, the Newtown CT shooter. A photograph released by the wire services reveals a delicate-looking kid with a shy smile and a goofy haircut. The standard reader's reaction would amount to a shake of the head and a "what could have made such a nice kid do it?" But there's another photo extant...

"Who is this guy?" tens of millions of American voters asked themselves last night. "This isn't the Mitt Romney the media's presented to me over the last six months?" Free of the corrupt media's corrupt filter; free of the spin, the lying fact-checkers, the gotchas, and the desperate effort to cover up any and all bad news that might hurt Obama -- by every standard, every measure, every opinion and every opinion poll, what we witnessed last night at the first presidential debate of 2012 was a commanding, dominating blow-out performance by Governor Mitt Romney. Last night the GOP contender...

We seem to be in the midst of another one of our periodic battles over liberal bias in the media, as denoted in recent days by Paul Ryan and various other conservatives vexed with the tone of campaign coverage. "It goes without saying that there is definitely media bias," Ryan said on Fox News. "I think most people in the mainstream media are left of center and, therefore, they want a very left-of-center president versus a conservative president like Mitt Romney." I think so myself after more than four decades of membership in that same suspect category, the gatherers and...