Along with a news-free interview with President Obama, this weekend’s Meet the Press on NBC also gave us two fine examples of how the gun-banners in the Old Media establishment skew the debate, not to mention how clear it is that they simply have no grasp of the issues – perhaps purposefully so.
During the panel discussion of the previous week’s news, as host David Gregory steered the discussion to gun control, he turned to Jon Meecham, former top man at Newsweek and current contributing editor to TIME Magazine, both flailing publications.
Meecham gave us a great example of how the far left rhetorically skews the debate to make its own side the “common sense” side while portraying anyone in opposition as outsiders, nuts, and extremists.
I worry that our attention span on these things is so limited. You had to bring up the question of guns as the president was laying out his second term agenda. It is one of these cultural, political issues where you have a ferociously well-organized opposition and a more diffuse common sense broader population and I think that’s where the tension is.
Notice how Meecham paints the “ferociously well-organized opposition” as being separate and distinct from the “common sense broader population.”
In other words, Meecham is saying anyone that supports the Second Amendment is part of a tiny number of “ferocious” and well-organized people while most Americans are “common sense” supporters of gun banning.
This is, of course, nonsense. The NRA has 4.3 million dues paying members. The group also has millions more supporters that don’t pay dues but still essentially support the NRA’s efforts. This great membership is hardly the idea of a small number of gun supporters standing against the vast majority of gun banners who just aren’t organized well enough to oppose the NRA that Mecham is trying to promulgate.
In fact, a recent poll found that the National Rifle Association is more popular with Meecham’s “common sense broader population” than the media is!
A few minutes later, gun banner Tom Brokaw thought he had a brilliant point, saying that we should have “clubs” where guns can be fired but where the guns remain permanently for storage.
Look, there’s gotta be limits of some kind. I’ve even talked to people who are gun owners saying, why couldn’t you have a club where they actually own the assault weapons and if you want to shoot it for target practice you have to go to the licensed club, get the gun, shoot it, and then check it back in.
This is what they do in England, for instance. If you want to enjoy target practice, you go to a club, but the gun can never leave the club unless it goes to a police station. British citizens are not allowed to store their firearms in their own homes.
But, then again, the Brits have no right to self-protection like we do in the United States. Brokaw showed that he clearly has no idea what the Second Amendment means, how it works, or what its history is. After all, if you cannot actually own your gun and store it in your home where you can get hold of it in emergencies, you are necessarily barred from being able to “bear arms” as the Second Amendment maintains.
The Second Amendment is not an assurance for hobbyists. It is a guarantee of a civil right.
Finally, throughout the panel segment, the participants continued to say “assault weapon” as if it described a single, quantifiable thing. It isn’t, and that is the biggest problem with this debate. The term “assault weapon” is practically meaningless but is bandied about as if it is a term of defined meaning.
This Meet the Press panel clearly showed how the left media attempts to skew the debate coupled with an entire lack of understanding of the issues.
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