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billh58

(6,641 posts)
Sun Jun 26, 2016, 05:05 PM Jun 2016

Guns are cuddly security blankets: How the media helps right-wing gun nuts push propaganda

Conservative politicians and pundits lie and distort far more than liberals do. At the same time, conservatives have a well-known persecution complex, frequently accusing the mainstream media of having some secret anti-conservative agenda. This puts mainstream media fact-checkers in an unenviable situation, trying to seem balanced in an environment where one side simply has more enthusiasm for lying than the other. Now the pressure to overemphasis or even exaggerate claims of liberal mendacity, in an attempt to seem more balanced, has infected Glenn Kessler’s coverage of the gun debate in the Washington Post.

Our tale begins with a speech by President Obama where he said, “We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.” This is, as Kessler’s investigation demonstrated, a true statement. The statistics are complicated by demographic and social factors, but overall, the data shows a direct correlation between how easy it is to get a gun and how many people die from gunshot wounds. But Kessler gave Obama two “Pinocchios”—out of four Pinocchio scale—to this claim.

“Many readers requested a fact check of this statement, believing it to be untrue,” Kessler writes. I’ll bet they did! Conservative fetishization of guns is at a point where even suggesting that guns might be unsafe is treated like you’re insulting their mother, so of course they’re going to be outraged that Obama dare suggest that objects created for the sole purpose of killing might be very good at making people dead. It’s understandable that, deluged by all that conservative outrage, one might give into the urge to show that you’re not biased by giving them what they want. But unfortunately, Kessler, despite being a fact-checker, ends up heavily massaging the statistics to give conservative readers those Pinocchios they desperately want.

To get to the conclusion that Obama fudged the facts, Kessler starts by manipulating the data that Obama used for his claim, by removing suicides from the number of overall gun deaths. He justifies this by arguing “the president’s policy proposals are aimed at mass shootings, not suicides.” But that is, in and of itself, a false statement. While Obama did focus heavily on mass shooting in his speech, it’s clear that he was making a larger point about how the proliferation of guns in our society leads to more gun deaths. “There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America,” Obama said right before the sentences in question. “So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer?” It’s clear that he was speaking about how a gun-fanatical society is one where people get shot to death a lot, and not just in the context of mass shootings.

Link


Seems to be a considerable amount of NRA damage control going on recently, even here on DU, and complete with the same fact distortions and outright lies as used by the right-wing gun worshipers. Could it be that Wayne LaPierre, Ted Nugent, Larry Pratt, and the rest of the right-wing gun nut "leadership" are getting nervous about all of the bad publicity in the news lately?

The gun control movement is growing in number and size with more and more organizations reaching more Americans with the common sense notion of regulating a dangerous consumer product (what a concept). Lend your voice and support to the movement to rein in the madness and mayhem caused by guns in our country.
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Guns are cuddly security blankets: How the media helps right-wing gun nuts push propaganda (Original Post) billh58 Jun 2016 OP
adult pacifyers. pansypoo53219 Jun 2016 #1
Much worse than that... billh58 Jun 2016 #2

billh58

(6,641 posts)
2. Much worse than that...
Sun Jun 26, 2016, 07:00 PM
Jun 2016

See the face of the right-wing gun culture in the United States:

Larry Pratt, the former executive director of Gun Owners of America, added Hillary Clinton this week to the list of public officials who he has warned will face violence from gun owners if they impose regulations on guns.

Pratt, who said last month that if conservatives lose at the “ballot box” they might “have to resort to the bullet box,” said in an interview on the “Crosstalk” radio program on Tuesday that Clinton’s support for some gun regulations may be an attempt to disarm civilians so that she can impose tyranny.

The Second Amendment means, he told Clinton, that “if you even try to go off in a tyrannical direction, the Constitution protects the people’s right to protect the people themselves against people like you.”

-Snip-

Pratt has made similar comments about other public officials including President Obama, Rep. Carolyn Maloney and Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/larry-pratt-gun-owners-keeping-hillary-clinton-imposing-tyranny?


This asshat represents the fine, upstanding Americans who make up the irresponsible, extremist segment of the "responsible" gun owners in our country. Along with the NRA right-wing gun nuts, they represent a sizable portion of the gun culture on our streets, and in our communities.

They are dangerous individuals bearing dangerous lethal weapons.
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