The enemies of your right to keep and bear arms apparently hope that if they can concoct a big enough lie, then trick enough supposedly “credible” people to repeat that lie often enough, then their falsehood will become “truth.” Don’t let them get away with it!
They’ve done this for decades. But today I want to tell you why those lies are more dangerous than ever.
First, let’s look at the latest lie in detail.
In March 2023, CNN ran a story misleadingly headlined, “Children and teens are more likely to die by guns than anything else.” In August, The Washington Post followed up with a story in which they claimed, “In 2020, firearms for the first time killed more children and adolescents than car accidents.” In October, The New York Times published a story claiming, “The death rate attributable to car accidents fell by almost half, leaving firearm injuries the top cause of accidental death in children.”
The clear intent of all these statements was to convince readers that gun accidents among children were skyrocketing, causing more fatalities than any other cause. That’s a lie.
If you look at CDC’s 2020 accidental death statistics for Americans under age 15—the traditional actuarial cutoff point for discussing “children”—you’ll see firearms weren’t the number-one cause of accidental death. In fact, guns weren’t even among the top five causes.
Moreover, fatal gun accidents didn’t even come close to fatal car crashes. If you average the CDC’s figures for 2018, 2019 and 2020—the most-recent year for which a full report is available—you’ll see that for children under age 15, accidental firearm fatalities are outnumbered by motor vehicle fatalities 19-to-1.
Indeed, the only way they can claim gun deaths outnumber traffic deaths among children is by mixing apples with oranges in two different ways: By mixing unintentional accidents with deliberate crimes; and by classifying everyone under the age of 25 as “children.”
We’ve seen this kind of dishonesty before.
In the 1990s, President Clinton claimed the semi-automatic firearms he wanted to ban were the “weapon of choice” of criminals—a lie. Meanwhile, Clinton’s allies at the news networks repeatedly tried to deceive viewers by showing videos of machine guns firing in full-automatic mode to illustrate stories about semi-auto gun bans. Journalists tried to claim these were honest mistakes. But after being corrected by NRA on countless occasions—yet continuing to show the same deceptive footage—they showed their excuses were as transparent as their lies.
Another example: In 2009, President Obama claimed that 90% of the guns recovered in Mexico came from the U.S. Within days, it seemed everyone in the Obama-Biden White House—along with every mainstream reporter—was spouting that same scripted soundbite statistic. But it wasn’t true—not even close. As the strategic geopolitical intelligence platform Stratfor pointed out, “almost 90% of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the U.S.” Of those that were, many were deliberately smuggled into Mexico by Obama’s ATF through its dimwitted and disastrous “Fast and Furious” debacle.
So, politicians and the press have a long, shameful history of working together to deceive the public. What’s new, different and uniquely dangerous today is that they’re pushing legislation—the absurdly-named so-called “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act” (JCPA)—that would make this toxic partnership permanent and self-sustaining.
I’m sure you’ve heard how many legacy media outlets are effectively going broke because so much news is available online for free. Under this proposed legislation, the tech giants of the internet would be forced by the government to pay a portion of their advertising income to the legacy media conglomerates. Although the legislation is billed as a way to “save journalism,” it’s really just a way to subsidize and incentivize establishment-friendly journalism while freezing out the independent journalists we increasingly depend on to ferret out the truth.
Make no mistake: When government gets into the racket of taking money from the most profitable industry in America (the tech giants of Silicon Valley, who routinely censor, “shadow-ban” or silence anyone they disagree with) and then give that money to the most politically important industry in America (the legacy-media propagandists who are only too happy to lie to prop up the false narratives of their government sponsors), very bad things can happen.
The best way to prevent that kind of state-media internet-censorship government-propaganda industrial complex is to use the tools already at our disposal—in every voting booth in America.
