Dana Loesch Pushes Back on Media Reporting On Mass Shootings

 Radio Host and pro-rights advocate Dana Loesch spoke with Fox News' Jesse Watters on how the media miss reports mass shootings, including shootings involving gangs violence, to make it look like we have many more than we have.  She talks about how they inflate school shooting numbers by including shootings that occurred off campus, but the victim may have ran and died on school property.

Not All Survivors of Parkland School Shooting Are Pushing Gun Control

Guy Benson has a great profile at Townhall.com of Kyle Kashuv, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting who is not getting the attention that some of his classmates:

On the afternoon of February 14, 2018, Kyle Kashuv found himself in the midst of a waking nightmare, huddled in a classroom closet for two harrowing hours, attempting to console and reassure terrified fellow students. An apparent fire drill had abruptly turned into a bloodbath after a gunman calculatingly lured potential victims into the halls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by pulling the fire alarm -- a ghoulish maneuver designed to maximize the bodycount. Teachers began following protocol by locking classroom doors after an active shooter alert was announced over the campus intercom system. Kashuv ended up piling into one room only after an instructor made a judgment call to unlock her door to accommodate a group of panicked students. The closet felt "like the safest place to be," he remembers. "I was trying to calm people down who were crying hysterically, letting everyone know that everything would be alright." Kids frantically checked their phones and social media feeds for emerging information as they remained holed up, waiting for a SWAT team's liberation. It finally came around 4:30pm. They had survived; seventeen others had not.

You haven't seen this young man on the legacy media though. You see, he supports the 2nd Amendment and doesn't believe the acts of one deranged individual should turn the Constitution upside down.  When asked by Benson why his views have not gotten the attention of media darling David Hogg, he said:

..."I don't know," he says, hesitantly. "Maybe because I don't use inflammatory language. I speak calmly and logically without much emotion. I don't necessarily make the very best headline." He's politely referring to some of his more "famous" peers' propensity to launch provocative and partisan attacks, such as repeated assertions that people who disagree with their political or policy preferences "don't care" about dead children, or have 'blood on their hands.' But Kashuv knows that the disparate treatment he's lived isn't merely attributable to stylistic differences; he's convinced that the substance of his views is what has diminished his appeal to many activists and journalists.

"I'm a very strong Second Amendment supporter and I will continue to be throughout this entire campaign." he tells me. "As of right now, my main goal is to meet with legislators and represent to them that there are big Second Amendment supporters in our community. Through this entire thing, my number one concern has been making sure that the rights of innocent Americans aren't infringed upon." He says that when he visited the state capitol to talk to lawmakers shortly after the tragedy, he consistently asked for guarantees that the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun owners wouldn't be attacked or abridged. He's waded into this debate "kind of reluctantly," he admits, observing that at some point he realized that he was one of the few conservatives in his school who were speaking up in public. "It's not even by my choosing, it's just come to that," he remarks. "I feel somewhat obligated to do this because the other half of America needs to be heard. I'm doing this because I have to."

He told Benson that he supports much of the "Never Again" cause, just not the gun control part, and feels "ostracized and ignored" by students and the adults  who disagree with his conservative politics. It's basically "you're with us or you're against us."   Read the entire profile.

The Media's Lazy and Dishonest Reporting on Firearms

That was the subject of Kevin Williamson's piece at National Review Online Monday night.  In the article, Williamson lays out how the media doesn't take the time get the story right in it's reporting.  For instance:

Newspaper accounts of firearms are almost always illiterate and inaccurate. If you see something described as an AK-47 being used in a crime in the United States, you can be almost certain that it is not an actual AK-47. (This is not helped by the fact that many different kinds of firearms are marketed under the name AK-47.) An AK-47 is a select-fire rifle, i.e., a rifle that can be fired in fully automatic or semiautomatic mode, chambered for the 7.62×39mm round. These are pretty rare beasts in the United States; what’s normally meant by “AK-47″ is a semiautomatic rifle styled like an AK-47 and/or operating with a similar mechanism, and this elides the fact that one of these things is a full-auto machine gun and one isn’t. Given the rather energetic efforts of the anti-gun lobby and the press to conflate automatic and semiautomatic weapons, one cannot help but think this is at least partly intentional. In any case, it is misleading and confusing, and therefore bad journalism.

Similar problems come up with other firearms. “Uzi” is a brand name for everything from submachine guns to wristwatches. Some Uzi firearms you can buy at your local gun shop, and some a private citizen cannot legally buy under practically any circumstance. A great many different firearms are sold under the “AR” designation as well. When Bushmaster rifles were the evil black gun of the moment, “Bushmaster” was similarly treated as though it were a particular kind of rifle rather than a brand name for many different rifles. There are many different kinds of Glocks. Beyond using evocative and inaccurate brand and model names, the usual media practice is to use qualitative descriptors, many of which are meaningless (“assault weapon”) or generally misleading (“high-powered rifle”). That’s obviously unsatisfactory, too.

It should not be too much to expect reporters to do a little journalism and provide accurate information about the topic on which they are writing. Every now and then you will see a report that corrects inaccurate information from politicians on the subject but for the most part, references to "automatic weapons" or "weapons of war" by the likes of Hillary Clinton or President Obama go unchallenged.

I was listening to a podcast of Gun for Hire Radio recently and the show is using what can only be described as stupid comments by politicians when returning from commercial breaks.  One was a clip of a female legislator talking about "...bullets that have incendiary devices.  You don't need that to shoot deer, and if you did you could cook it too."  Another audio clip featured was a California politician talking about a "30 caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within a half second.  A 30 magazine clip in half a second."  This is the kind of ignorance you rarely seen corrected by the media.