Shouldn’t journalists who want to tackle the issues related to illegal use of guns in America, and thereby help us find real solutions to violent crime in places like Chicago’s South Side, start by being honest? John Lott thinks so. It is this principled position that caused him to agree, despite his prior experiences, to be interviewed for Katie Couric’s film “Under The Gun.”
As an expert on these issues, he hoped to offer some perspective and balance. Although he says he went into the interview like a person readying himself to be grilled by a prosecutor, even he was surprised at what happened after he left the four-hour-long interview with Couric.
No doubt you’ll recall that Couric’s “Under The Gun” made headlines when it was revealed that an eight-second pause had been edited in to make it seem like members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL) were stumped by a question. Thankfully, the gun-rights advocates also recorded the interview. When they released the unedited tape, Couric was shown to be the propagandist and liar she is.“Bloomberg asked for Lott to be cut and Couric made this happen.” — Radio show host John Cardillo
As I wrote here back in June, Lott had wanted to leave the New York City hotel room where Couric, backed by seven staffers, had interviewed him. He wanted to leave because, he said, “She kept asking me the same questions in different ways. It was clear they were trying to get me to say something that could be taken out of context.” However, he didn’t walk out because he didn’t want that on film.
Months later, Lott learned he was cut from the film while live on the radio. Lott was on “The John Cardillo Show” promoting his smashing new book The War on Guns (“smashing” because it bludgeons the anti-gun media and groups with the substantiated facts about guns), when Cardillo said, “I don’t know if you know this … I don’t know if we spoke about this, but my brother knows one of the financiers on the Katie Couric project—he was sort of an ancillary financier who’s actually pro-Second Amendment—and he told me your footage from that documentary was cut after a private between Katie Couric and Michael Bloomberg.”
Lott answered that he hadn’t heard that Bloomberg had been able to censor him again. Cardillo said, “Yes. They were going to run it, and Bloomberg and Couric had a private screening, and after that screening is when your footage was cut.”
As this report needed to be substantiated, I reached out to Cardillo and other sources.
“This financier is not anti-gun. He is a hunter,” Cardillo told me. “He does lean slightly left on many issues, but that only makes him normal in the elite and wealthy circles in and around New York City. He was comfortable with partly financing this project because he knows Couric and because he saw the interview list for the film. He thought it would be a balanced production. He is angry that it wasn’t.”
Cardillo added, “This source says Bloomberg was given creative control. Bloomberg asked for Lott to be cut and Couric made this happen. As a former NYPD detective, I am shocked at the influence Bloomberg has with people like Couric. Lott is the gold standard. As a detective, I knew his research was considered to be solid even by the NYPD.”
Cardillo said because of the time he spent as part of the NYPD, he knows a lot of people who work or have worked on security details for high-profile people, and he has been told many times by these individuals that Bloomberg is “fanatical about the gun issue. He will drop everything to view a documentary or whatever if it has to do with pushing gun control in America.”
“If they can’t control the message, they won’t talk to you.” — Researcher John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research CenterFor his part, Lott, who is also president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told me, “I’ve actually reached out to Bloomberg and his people many times to interview them and to challenge them to debates. They never respond. If they can’t control the message, they won’t talk to you.” (I’ve also found this to be true with regards to my reporting, and while I was researching my book The Future of the Gun.)
Bloomberg is using his vast wealth in public ways to diminish, if not outright take away, the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. But he is also doing a lot behind closed doors. When journalists, or so-called journalists, go along with censoring key parts of the story because they are inconvenient to their political desires, they destroy the very thing they are supposed to be seeking—the truth. This is the key reason why the vast majority of people don’t trust the media today.
John Stuart Mill, in his classic human-rights book On Liberty (1859), outlined the dilemma of politically correct censorship when he wrote:
Secondly, though the silenced opinion is an error, it may, and very well commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any object is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
Thirdly, even if the received opinion is not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.
Some anti-Second Amendment activists, such as Bloomberg, are trying with some success to silence opposing views. They want their politically correct censorship to dumb down the American mind.
If we let them do this, we’ll lose all of our freedoms.
