Good Guys With Guns

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 cranks—oops, I mean “mental health experts”—who had never met LaPierre had diagnosed him as crazy.

As someone who went to journalism school and has worked in media for years, I’m 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, LaPierre’s statement is absolutely true—and 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 wounded—thanks 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. They’re 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 tolls—one, 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 story—but 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 LaPierre’s “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.

Ham’s examples aren’t fantasies or hypotheticals. They’re 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 women’s 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, let’s turn “Mayan 14” into a household name.

Many of us, from Rush on down, have been wondering how to combat this media bias. Media ad buys may be a tactic to explore.

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.

Two days after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School... 46 more innocent lives were taken in Connecticut.

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

Media ad buys may be a tactic to explore.

NO!!!

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 aren’t - 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 dispatcher’s question as to the cause of Zimmerman’s suspicion of Martin, and Zimmerman’s answer (“He’s black”) to the subsequent, unambiguously different, question as to Martin’s 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 doesn’t 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.
Journalism and Objectivity

...entity is that each member of the Associated Press needs to stay in good graces with the whole of the Associated Press.

Ah!
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 you’ve got Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in your pocket, “we” don’t begin to have the money - and the owners wouldn’t sell for any price, even then. They’re true believers!! It’s 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 don’t 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 it’s isn’t 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.

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