What Dart Should Teach Reporters

By Jeff Knox

(January 29, 2015) I recently reported that the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a project of the prestigious Columbia School of Journalism, is hosting a workshop for reporters in Arizona, supposedly intended to help them more effectively report on guns and “gun violence.”  The conference raised red flags for gun owners by including inflammatory, misleading factoids about the toll of gun violence in our society while neglecting any mention of the benefits.  A closer read revealed that funding for the workshop was generously provided by Mike Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety – a gun control advocacy project.  Dart’s director, Bruce Shapiro assured me that, though Bloomberg and Everytown were underwriting the event, they were not participating in selection of participants, curriculum, or presenters.  But when I pointed out the blatant anti-rights bias displayed in the Dart announcement, and asked him if prominent pro-rights and firearms experts were going to be included as presenters, he quit responding to my emails.

As I doubt that Dart is going to invite me, or any other gun-knowledgeable, pro-rights critic of media to participate in the program, here’s the one point that I think is most important for every journalist – and consumers of media – to know about reporting on gun issues: You are being lied to.  Moreover, unless you set aside your own biases, you will believe and perpetuate the lies.

Continue reading An Ethical Education for Reporters →

Is Teaching Propaganda Ethical?

By Jeff Knox

(January 15, 2015) A workshop titled “Covering Gun Violence” is being offered in Phoenix by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma to “help journalists and news organizations in the Southwest improve their reporting on guns and gun violence.”  That sounds reasonable and helpful.  Surely the Dart Center, a project of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism could help improve the state of reporting on the firearms issue, especially in light of the way reporters seem to call every pistol a Glock, every rifle an AK47, and every gun an automatic. 

But there’s more to the story.  The workshop is being funded by Mike Bloomberg’s anti-rights advocacy conglomerate Everytown for Gun Safety, and the very general description of the “experts” who are going to be presenting the training sounds very much like the same “experts” that Bloomberg and his associates rely on to push their biased and misleading “research” and reports.  Even the call for applicants itself leads off with an anti-rights propaganda rant, quoting misleading statistics and discredited claims straight out of the Everytown propaganda playbook. 

Continue reading Bloomberg Buys Journalism School →

Paranoia Leads to Tragedy

By Jeff Knox

(January 7, 2015) Just days after the horror at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a 23-year old college student in Connecticut was a victim of another gun-related tragedy.  No guns were fired, no one was physically injured, but even so, a life was ruined.  William Dong was licensed in Connecticut to carry a concealed handgun.  He worked for an armored car company and, along with being a good student, and hard worker, he was a budding firearm enthusiast.

Like all of us, Dong was deeply disturbed by the atrocity in Newtown and the subsequent media hype surrounding that tragic event.  And like many people, especially those near the event, he developed a fear of something like that happening again and being helpless to do anything about it.  He was reassured by his own ability to carry and effectively use a handgun, but also wanted to have a good personal-defense carbine.  That’s where William Dong made his first mistake; on a trip to Pennsylvania he purchased an AR-style rifle from a private seller.  It’s not illegal to purchase a long gun in another state in a face-to-face transaction, but out-of-state purchases should be made through a licensed dealer.  Since the rifle he purchased had a collapsible stock and other “military” features, it was subsequently banned in Connecticut, compounding Dong’s mistake.

Continue reading Gun Laws Make Criminals and Victims of the Innocent →

The One Thing You Can Do for Rights in 2015

By Jeff Knox

(January 1, 2015) It is mind-boggling that we’re now living in 2015.  I like to think I’m not so old, but I also remember when 2001 was a distant date in a science fiction movie.  I’m still waiting for the flying car I was promised.  But flying cars weren’t the only things we were promised back in the good old days.  Looking back at when we were looking forward to these days, I remember predictions about a coming ice-age, a one-world government, and the end to crime, hunger, and poverty.  There were also lots of predictions about the end of gun ownership.  Back when groups like the National Coalition to Ban Handguns and Handgun Control Incorporated were new, they were describing a process whereby they were going to completely do away with handgun ownership by slowly adding one little restriction on top of another over a couple of decades.  More than 40 years later, they are sticking to that strategy with new language and new tactics, but the target:  destruction of the “gun culture” and the right to keep and bear arms, remains the same.

They’ve made some progress on some fronts, and are positioning themselves to make more in coming years, but rights supporters have been working hard too.  We’ve installed strong rights protections into the laws of most states, spread the gospel of lawful concealed carry to every state in the nation, and proven that more guns doesn’t mean more crime, but that as gun and gun ownership have gone up, crime and firearm accidents have actually gone down – dramatically.  Those efforts have pushed the anti-rights extremists to back completely away from their demands for banning and confiscating handguns, and instead call for thinner and thinner slices off of the Bill of Rights.  Instead of calling for national registration of all guns and gun owners, they now call for “universal background checks,” something that sounds completely different, but accomplishes much the same thing.  Under their “background check” proposals, government records would be created for every firearms transfer – records that could then be computerized to identify almost every legal gun and gun owner – thereby accomplishing a major step in their goal of universal registration, but hiding the goal behind camouflaged language.

Continue reading A Resolution for 2015 →

Bloomberg’s Professional Liars Keep on Lying

By Jeff Knox

(December 24, 2014) John Feinblatt, Mike Bloomberg’s top flunky in his gun control operations, has doubled down on the anti-rights lobby’s lies in a piece on the leftist web site The Daily Beast.  As I have been pointing out in my ongoing series about the lies of the anti-rights lobby, virtually everything that comes out of these propaganda operations is either blatantly false or seriously distorted.  Feinblatt’s Beast piece is a prime example of this.  The piece is headlined: The NRA’s Twisted List for Santa, and presents 10 bullet point distortions of the NRA’s position on various gun control proposals.

According to Feinblatt, the NRA’s political wish list includes:

$1·         Guns for Felons.  Feinblatt equates the NRA’s support for the federal process whereby some felons can petition to have their rights restored – after convincing a judge that they are not a threat to society – is tantamount to giving a free pass to murderers, rapists, and terrorists.  In reality – before Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) got all funding for the program blocked – the typical person seeking restoration of rights was not a hardened, violent offender, but rather one who had been convicted of crimes like tax evasion or possession of marijuana.  Their petitions were usually only considered after a minimum of 10 years of post-release, model citizenship. 

$1·         Guns for Terror Suspects.  Bloomberg and his lackeys want to add anyone who is on the “Terrorist Watch List” to the FBI’s “prohibited persons” database so they can’t legally buy a gun from a licensed dealer.  The problem here is that the “Watch List,” by necessity, is shrouded in secrecy.  No one knows what criteria are used to place a person’s name on the list nor is there a formal process for someone to get their name off the list.  Add to that the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has labeled fundamentalist Christians, Libertarians, opponents of abortion, military veterans and “patriots” as “potential terrorists,” and you can see why NRA would be leery of this proposal.

Continue reading Liars Lie – Even at Christmas →

Anti-Gun Groups: Even Their Names Are Lies

By Jeff Knox

(December 12, 2014) Advocates for gun control are liars.  They specialize in taking some little snippet of fact and presenting it in a way that totally misrepresents reality.  Statements like “3000 children are killed with guns every year,” don’t inform people that most of those “children” are late-teen gang-bangers who are actually killed by adults, or that accidental firearm deaths among children and youths have been falling for decades and are currently at historic lows, despite the fact that guns and gun ownership are up dramatically.  The claim that “gun deaths exceed traffic deaths” in this or that state, conceals the fact that two thirds of those deaths are suicides, and that suicide rates in “gun friendly” states are comparable to rates in “gun restrictive” states.  Still these misleading “factoids” are unquestioningly parroted by “journalists” based solely on press releases from professional anti-rights lobbyists. 

Advocacy organizations like Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, the Gun Violence Policy Center, or the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, all have “gun safety” or prevention of “gun violence” in their names, but even their names are lies.  All of them focus exclusively on restricting firearms – gun control – while ignoring the fact that gun control laws have no impact on gun violence and no relation to gun safety. 

Continue reading Even Names Are Lies →

Student Fighting for Concealed Carry Shot on Campus

By Jeff Knox

(December 4, 2014) Nathan Scott is a student at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He has a job working in the school library and is a member of Students for Concealed Carry at Florida State.  And he is a (barely) walking example of why his cause is so crucial, after being shot in the library recently and having no way to defend himself.

The group has been lobbying for several years to get the ban on lawful concealed carry of firearms on campus lifted. They argue that in a life-or-death crisis, when seconds count, police being just minutes away is not good enough. In the event of a violent criminal attack, they argue, a lot of damage can be done in the minutes – or seconds – before police can arrive. They say that a legally armed individual using a gun to save their own life could save many other lives as well. So far the collegians’ efforts to restore the right to arms on campus have been thwarted, leaving older students like Nathan, who qualify for a Florida Concealed Weapon License, with a choice of being defenseless, or risking expulsion and criminal prosecution.

The arguments in favor of banning all guns on campus generally revolve around “what if” scenarios: What if a licensee goes nuts? Or leaves a gun where someone irresponsible could get it? What if a licensee shoots at an attacker, but hits a bystander? What if police mistake the licensed student for the assailant and shot her? What if the licensee gets drunk or high on drugs (as, they remind us, so many college students do) and behaves irresponsibly with a gun?

Continue reading Who Needs a Gun on Campus? →

Blooming Assault on Nevada Gun Rights

By Jeff Knox

(November 26, 2014) While Mike Bloomberg and his billionaire buddies were spending upwards of $10 million dollars to implement a firearms registration scheme in Washington State, Bloomberg’s minions were hard at work initiating a similar assault on the rights of the people of Nevada.  Nevadans for Background Checks is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety.  As typical with the Bloomies, the “group” is touted as a local grass roots effort, but is funded, directed, and staffed primarily by Bloomberg and his professional rights abusers.  A few local extremists are included as window-dressing. 

Everytown’s Washington, DC attorney reserved the Nevadans for Background Checks name with the Nevada Secretary of State’s office earlier this year.  Filing information for the PAC and nonprofit corporation formed to push for the initiative, which significantly changes the state’s firearm transfer laws, lists Tara Paone as “Director, President” of the nonprofit and as “Director” of the PAC.  Tara Paone is elsewhere listed as Treasurer for Everytown for Gun Safety in New York, and was listed as the Director of the Everytown fund in support of I-594 in Washington.  Ms. Paone’s LinkedIn profile says she is a professional manager for nonprofits and that she resides in New York City.  The address listed for her on the Nevada paperwork appears to be a street address, but is actually a Post Office box.  The other person listed on the PAC and incorporation paperwork, as Treasurer and Director respectively, is an attorney and lobbyist named Matt Griffin, who appears to be an actual resident of the state.

Continue reading Blooming Assault on Nevada →

Hard Facts: More Guns but Less Crime

By Jeff Knox

(November 18, 2014) Crime and criminal violence tend to go up or down due to a variety of factors, many of them apparently not yet identified by criminologists and sociologists.  Poverty, the economy, unemployment, and illegal drugs are frequently point to as major factors, but for the past 7 years, as the US has gone through one of the worst recessions in our nation’s history. While we’ve seen high unemployment, unprecedented numbers of home foreclosures, and massive drug-related violence broiling in Mexico, violent crime in the US, including crime involving firearms, has been going down or holding steady. 

While politicians debate and billionaires expend millions of dollars convincing people to expand restrictions and record-keeping on gun sales, the problems they’re arguing about and supposedly addressing with their restrictions have been mitigating.  The media and paid “researchers” of the anti-rights crowd have successfully kept Americans’ attention focused on a few aberrations and away from the broader reality of declining crime. 

Continue reading Guns Up – Crime Down →