Ever since it was discovered that several armed churchgoers drew their weapons to stop a gunman at a church in Texas last week, the anti-gun mainstream media types have been trying to tell the public that armed, law-abiding citizens are a bad thing.
The New Year’s Day installment of media malpractice hyperbole arrives courtesy of the nauseatingly leftist USA Today:
The idea of law-abiding citizens exercising a constitutional right to defend themselves and others is “terrifying” in the fevered minds of the anti-gun Left.
The article doesn’t make any effort at all to find out about the others who were carrying weapons:
In other words, he’s exactly the kind of man you want around with a firearm. But we know nothing about the at least six other parishioners who also appeared to draw their handguns at West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas.
And that’s terrifying.
That’s pure fear-mongering. A little journalistic effort would yield some information about the other churchgoers, but what major newspaper has time for that anymore?
For the purpose of pedaling pure propaganda, it’s much easier for the MSM to remain ignorant and almost outright say that one of the other churchgoers might be a danger with a weapon.
Anti-gun propaganda is, of course, rooted in ignorance. Gun-haters don’t know anything about firearms or gun owners. Lacking any reality-based (I’m hyphenating a lot today, aren’t I?) points of reference, it’s easy for them to confuse the random psycho shooters with the rest of us.
People who carry take excellent care of their weapons and are no strangers to range practice, but the anti-2A crowd wouldn’t know that. In their warped imaginations, all of us regular gun owners are just amped-up yahoos who sleep with our AR-15s and have .50 cals mounted on our coffee tables.
I generally run into two types of non-military gun owners. The first are those who, like myself, grew up shooting and developed safe firearms habits over a lifetime. The second are people who fell in love with shooting in adulthood and made sure that they were properly trained.
My grandfather owned a gun store when I was a little kid. I got my first gun — a Savage bolt-action .22 — when I was six. I’ve been around gun people my whole life, which is why I know that the media portrayal of us is always wrong.
The kind of ignorance that the media continues to double-down on when talking about guns is far more terrifying than any of the people I see at the range.
___
PJ Media Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.”