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Washington Post discredits Obama's 'exaggerated gun claims' - again :: 03/14/2015

The traditionally anti-gun Washington Post yesterday once again called out President Barack Obama on his nasty habit of misrepresenting reality when it comes to firearms, giving his recent “odd series of exaggerated gun claims” a whopping three “Pinocchio’s,” which translates to suggesting the president has been caught telling fibs.

This came two days after Bizpac Review headlined a piece with, “Anyone checking Obama’s 2nd Amendment Facts? He’s making it up as he goes.” That’s a polite way of saying the president is dishing out fabrications rather than facts.

Almost two years ago, on April 2, 2013, the Washington Post handed Obama another three Pinocchio penalty for his repeated claims that 40 percent of all gun sales in this country do not involve background checks. The newspaper found that this claim was, and remains, pure bunkum.

This time around, the newspaper challenged and refuted statements made by Obama recently during a town hall meeting at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C. The president told his audience, “What we also have to recognize is, is that our homicide rates are so much higher than other industrialized countries. I mean by like a mile. And most of that is attributable to the easy, ready availability of firearms, particularly handguns.”

According to the newspaper, that statement is “factually incorrect.” Statistically, the United States falls pretty far behind Brazil, Mexico and Russia in the murder rate column.

Then Obama made this claim: “It’s easier for you to buy a handgun and clips than it is for you to buy a fresh vegetable.” That remark has been getting a lot of flak across the Internet over the past week, leaving gun rights activists rolling with belly laughs.

And what does the Washington Post say about it? “This is just a very strange comment that appears to have no statistical basis. Perhaps one can just shrug it off as hyperbole, but is this really something the president of the United States should say to college students? As far as we know, there are no areas in the United States where background checks are needed to buy vegetables.”

Finally, Obama launched this stinker: “People just say well, we should have firearms in kindergarten and we should have machine guns in bars.” To its credit, the newspaper noted that Obama added, “You think I’m exaggerating — I mean, you look at some of these laws that come up.”

The Washington Post summed it up thusly: “The president was playing fast and loose with his language here—to a group of college students no less. There’s little excuse for the claim that in some neighborhoods, it is easier to buy a gun than vegetable (see update above) — or to say he’s ‘not exaggerating’ when he claims that some people have proposed laws that would allow machine guns in bars.”

Bizpac also refuted Obama’s demonstrably false claims about this country’s murder rate, which has been falling since 1993 and had been reduced about 50 percent by 2011, a period during which “privately owned guns increased from 192 million to 310 million.”

The website then puts it in perspective: “Homicide rates have remained historically low despite the crocodile cries from gun control activists. Which can only mean one thing – more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens means less murder.”

Obama has been caught, once again, engaging in the rhetoric of the gun prohibition lobby, which is a traditionally false narrative. Take, for example, last year’s campaign to pass Initiative 594 in Washington state. Proponents said it would reduce crime and save lives to require background checks on all gun sales in the state.

Tell that to Biftu Hussein Dadi, the 24-year-old woman who was stabbed to death last weekend. According to the Seattle P-I.com, the suspect in this case apparently had a .45-caliber pistol in a backpack, but he allegedly stabbed Dadi several times instead. How long before the gun ban crowd labels this as a "gun crime" same as they call last year's Santa Barbara barbarity a "mass shooting" when half of the victims were stabbed to death?

There’s one more thing about what has emerged as a pattern of falsehoods regarding firearms and Second Amendment rights. Proponents of stricter gun laws simply cannot bring themselves to admit it’s about gun control. Today’s Seattle Times provides an example.

In a story about the inability of anti-gunners to get their agenda moving in Olympia, the newspaper uses the term “gun-regulation advocates.” It used to be “gun safety” advocates. The lobby pushing all of this regulation calls itself the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility.

When the president gets caught telling whoppers, and called on it by a newspaper that has never been friendly toward the Second Amendment, that’s a problem. When the gun prohibition lobby can’t screw up the courage and conviction to properly identify itself as a gun “control” front and deceptively tries to sell itself as something else, and a newspaper can’t correctly label that lobby for what it is, that’s a signal that they no longer deserve the public trust, and perhaps never did.

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