PA Bill Number: HB335

Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.

Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...

Last Action: Removed from table

Last Action Date: May 1, 2024

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Is bias blinding the media in current push for more gun restrictions? :: 10/22/2015

The Los Angeles Times today in an editorial calling for more gun control efforts demonstrates what Second Amendment advocates have been asserting for years is a bias against guns that blinds at least some journalists beyond logic.

Politicians and the press appear to think the Second Amendment is up for grabs in the next election, and perhaps even before then.

The editorial laments that “At least 65 people have been shot to death in Los Angeles County since Sept. 1 — four in encounters with police, and most of the rest the sole victim of a single crime.” A few lines later it refers to what must seem like the Holy Grail: “researchers have repeatedly found that places with fewer guns and more controls tend to have less gun violence.”

Two days ago, the Chicago Tribune reported, “So far this year, at least 2,434 people have been shot in the city. That's 347 more than during the same period last year and 583 more than in 2013. As of early Monday, there have been at least 404 people shot to death this year, 55 more than during the same period last year and 40 more than in 2013.”

Los Angeles and Chicago are cities in states with strict gun laws. California’s laws have gotten consistently tougher in recent years, leaving one to suspect that the L.A. Times’ assertion is so absurd as to be the text book example of what one comedian defines as a major problem with too many people: “You can’t fix stupid.”

It should not take a genius to figure out that places with tough gun laws, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., have rather high body counts. This violence is frequently blamed on “lax gun laws” somewhere else.

The Times editorial points to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2013. The CDC, according to the Times, “counted 505 deaths from unintentional shootings, 11,208 gun-related homicides and 21,175 gun suicides in 2013. “

But wait a minute; according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2013, there were 12,253 total murder victims that year, of which 8,454 were killed with firearms. There appears to be a confusing disparity between the CDC and the FBI figures leaving one to wonder whose numbers should be presumed correct.

The Hill is reporting today that presidential contenders Donald Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton have “seized on guns” as a major campaign issue. “That’s especially true on the Democratic side: An analysis by The Trace found that there were more mentions of the words ‘gun’ and ‘guns’ at the first Democratic presidential debate this month than in all 14 Democratic debates in 2007...”

That’s an interesting observation, but what is The Trace? According to its own website, this publication “is an independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to expanding coverage of guns in the United States. We bring an admitted bias to our beat: We believe that this country’s rates of firearm-related deaths and injuries — an average of 88 lives lost per day, with another 196 people suffering nonfatal bullet wounds — are far too high.”

A few paragraphs later, the website explains, “The Trace is organized as a nonprofit corporation and is in the process of applying for tax-exempt status with the IRS. Our seed funding was provided by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and the Joyce Foundation; individual donors include Ken Lerer and Nick Hanauer.”

For those with short memories, Hanauer was one of the financial driving forces behind Initiative 594 last year in Washington State. That campaign raised and spent some $10 million to push through the gun control scheme that was sold as a “universal background check” measure. So far, it does not appear the new law is being enforced anywhere, and it is being challenged in federal court by the Bellevue-based Second Amendment Foundation and other entities and individuals.

Everytown for Gun Safety is the $50 million “grassroots” lobbying organization founded by anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg. He apparently doesn’t like guns but is protected around the clock by people who carry them.

CNN today is carrying an Op-Ed by Dan Gross, president of the anti-gun Brady Campaign that is headlined “We’ve reached the tipping point on gun control.” In his essay, Gross reports, “there is also overwhelming public support for change, which only continues to increase. An astounding 93% of the American public, including 90% of Republican voters, more than 80% of gun owners and more than 70% of NRA households support expanding Brady background checks to all gun sales.”

Yet, in the aforementioned I-594 election, that measure passed with slightly less than 60 percent of the vote. One might be compelled to wonder why, if this is such a slam-dunk issue, Hanauer and his associates – including Bill and Melinda Gates, Paul Allen, Steve and Connie Ballmer and Bloomberg, along with several less-wealthy Seattle-area elitists – had to spend more than $10 million to pass it. It should have passed easily on its own merits, and with numbers far closer to those alluded to by Gross.

The press loves a good scrap, and what better argument to promote to the American public than one as visceral and divisive as guns? It’s class warfare at its most basic level, with the bitter clingers pitted against the progressive sophisticates.

There was one interesting observation in The Hill’s report that bears repeating. “For Clinton,” the story said, “gun control is of paramount importance politically because it’s one of the few areas where she’s staked out a position to the left of (Bernie) Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont.”

Clinton, many people fear, wants to take this country farther to the left than the current president. Yesterday, Rasmussen Reports noted that only 24 percent of likely U.S. voters think the country is headed in the right direction. Most Americans don’t care to be led like sheep, and they really dislike being pushed in a direction they don’t want to go.

Regardless what polling data says, or what the researchers quoted by the Los Angeles Times suggest, Americans are not likely to give up their rights like sheep, and if they’re pushed hard enough to surrender those rights, they just might push back. Apparently some people believe the Second Amendment is up for grabs. Is it?

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