The Patriot Post® · MSM Peddles More Fake News on Guns

It’s no secret that the Leftmedia has no love for the Second Amendment, as CNN, for example, has made seemingly endless use of the Parkland, Florida, atrocity as the backdrop for its barrage of anti-gun propaganda. But CNN is far from the only mainstream media outlet guilty of this kind of agenda-driven “journalism.” Enter The New York Times with an op-ed piece dubiously titled, “There is a middle ground on guns.” In the article, the writer, Margaret Renkl, falsely asserts, “Americans are now more likely to be shot to death than to die in a car accident.” She then attempts to back up her flawed stat by referencing a CDC factsheet revealing that slightly more people were killed by guns than in car accidents in 2015. However, Renkl fails to note a significant qualifier: 61% of the individuals killed by guns were due to suicide, while only 36% were deemed homicides. After such accounting, the number of individuals who died in car accidents was three times as many as those murdered via a firearm.

But in further reading Renkl’s piece it becomes clear that she is not interested nor would seemingly would be moved by solid data and facts, as the crux of her anti-gun argument rests almost entirely on emotion. She notes that both her husband and son are teachers, and she relays that they have wondered whether they may possibly be the next victims of a school attack. Renkl describes her emotional response at the thought: “For just a second, I couldn’t breathe,” adding later, “Not a single day goes by when I don’t worry about whether they will all be safe in their classrooms.”

Well, Renkl may want to start worrying about whether her husband or son will get home every day on the road, as, statistically speaking, they are 1,000 times more likely to be killed in a car accident than in a school shooting. As we have noted before, the number of school shootings has dropped significantly since the 1990s. In fact, Renkl’s husband and son are more likely to die from an insect sting than a mass shooting at school. However, in the world of leftist propaganda, it’s feelings that matter more than reason and facts.

That’s why the supposed “middle ground” solution proposed by Renkl is anything but. She asserts that since “everyone is worried about the threat of gun violence” then an obvious solution is an “outright ban” of “semiautomatic weapons,” while at the same time she claims she’s not interested in repealing the Second Amendment. Once again Renkl, is seemingly blind to the actual threat — a criminal, not firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens. The fact is that firearms are used far more often in protecting against and preventing crime than for engaging in crime. However, if someone like Renkl can be emotionally manipulated to view guns as “evil,” then seemingly no amount of reason or evidence will prove to sway their opinions, and it is this emotion over and against reason that the Leftmedia employs in its anti-gun crusade.