The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the federal bump stock ban was a victory for the rule of law and for those looking to rein in bureaucratic overreach, but some in the mainstream media seem to be insinuating that recent crimes—ones not even involving bump stocks—are somehow the result of that decision.
A recent report from Erin McLaughlin for NBC News reported three different violent criminal shootings before noting that they occurred just days after the Court’s decision.
“A mass shooting at a splash pad in Michigan, another at a Juneteenth celebration in Texas and yet another at a gathering in Massachusetts, all just days after Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that rejects a ban on bump stocks,” said McLaughlin.
McLaughlin then gave what details were available regarding the three criminal acts before jumping back to the recent decision from the Supreme Court. She once again brought the bump stock ban, and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the ban, into her report. “The weekend shootings come just days after the Supreme Court struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the gun accessories used to modify semi-automatic weapons so that they can fire faster. But this morning, many are just searching for answers,” said McLaughlin
In the final sentence of the report, McLaughlin offers a qualifier: “The shootings from over the weekend did not involve bump stocks to our knowledge, but experts say that if they did, they could have been so much worse.”
While McLaughlin admits that not a single one of the shootings appears to have involved a bump stock-equipped firearm, she still deemed it necessary to include in her report language many would consider insinuates otherwise. This would appear to be a tremendous breach of journalistic integrity.
In the Michigan attack, the man committing the violent assault did so with a 9 mm handgun, then later shot himself to death with a different 9 mm handgun. In the Texas shooting, law-enforcement officers reported they had recovered shell casings, but didn’t say what caliber. It’s likely that they, too, were handgun casings based on initial reports on how the incident evolved from a dispute between two groups attending the celebration. Certainly many anti-gun media outlets would have tried to further discredit so-called “assault weapons” in response to the crime if there was any indication one of the disfavored semi-automatics was involved. The same holds true in Massachusetts, where authorities have not said what kind of gun was used. If it had been a semi-automatic rifle either with a bump stock or capable of being equipped with one, there’s no doubt the NBC report on the shooting would have mentioned that quite prominently.
That NBC repeatedly mentioned the Supreme Court decision throughout its report of the shootings can be no accident. Offering a late, one-sentence hypothetical qualifier speaks volumes about the state of mainstream media and their abundance of anti-gun animus. And the fact that one of these crimes clearly involved a handgun, not a semi-automatic rifle, along with the distinct probability that the other two did as well, further highlights this animus.
