Originally published in the May 2018 Official Journals of the National Rifle Association
I have long believed, and often said, that one of America’s greatest threats is national news media that fail to tell the truth.
When members of the news media ignore truth and, instead, distort it to deceive Americans to fit their own agenda, the democratic principles upon which our nation was founded are threatened.
NRA members and gun owners have long witnessed the media’s deliberate distortion of the truth. Reporters who couldn’t tell the difference between a semi-automatic and a sharp stick rush to the cameras with calls for bans on all sorts of firearms and magazines and anything else they can think of. Media pundits mock the more than 100 million law-abiding American gun owners, and the media outlets waste no time in exploiting tragedy to blame and shame NRA members for the violent, criminal acts of deranged madmen.
In the nearly four decades I’ve been helping the NRA defend our freedom, I’ve never seen the national media consistently tell the truth about our Association and our Second Amendment. But gun owners—and the freedom we fight to preserve—have never been as savagely attacked as during the past year.
Think about it. Is there an evil, nasty name the media hasn’t called us? Killers. Crazy. Gun nuts. Whackos. Bullies. Insane. Cold-hearted. Evil. Nut jobs. Murderers. Not to mention a lot of names most of us would never repeat.
For the national news media, it’s not about truth. It’s about destroying the NRA to destroy the Second Amendment. So they’ll go on any attack they can and tell any lie they conjure. It reminds me of the lyrics of that old Don Henley song, “Dirty Laundry.”
Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers
In everybody’s pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry
We can do “The Innuendo”
We can dance and sing
When it’s said and done
We haven’t told you a thing
We all know that Kraft is king
Give us dirty laundry
If it were just a matter of most of the media hating NRA members, that would be one thing. But it’s far more than that. We face a well-orchestrated, coordinated, deliberate effort to demean and diminish the NRA and regulate our freedom out of existence. You see, the national news media have been taken over by a new wave of European-style socialists who don’t believe in our constitutional freedom or free-market capitalism. These are the principles that have made America the greatest nation on Earth.
The 5 million men and women of the NRA, and the millions of American gun owners who look to us for leadership, might be the only group capable of stopping these European-style socialists from achieving their dream state.
That is why the national media attacks against the NRA have become so aggressive.
Just this past February, NBC’s Chuck Todd said this about the NRA: “They [NRA] are showing no empathy. … They seem to stick their head in the sand. Not even wanting to pretend to offer answers or solutions or alternative ideas. … They have not presented themselves as part of the solution.”
Not part of the solution? We’ve offered the only solutions that work. So, one more time, I’ll remind all of the national news media about where the NRA stands.
We remain steadfast in our commitment to individual freedom, and empowering law-abiding Americans to make their own decisions about the safety and security of themselves and their families.
We are absolutely determined to pass the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.
We have repeatedly offered real solutions that are proven to work:
Put trained, armed security in every school.
Fix the broken mental health system.
Enforce the federal gun laws against every drug dealer and criminal gang member on the street to stop them before they get to their next victim.
Immediately prosecute dangerous people when they show up to buy a gun.
And once and for all, heed our call that has gone unanswered for 25 years: Force every state to submit the name of every last prohibited person into the background check system.
These are real solutions that respect the individual freedom that is the birthright of every law-abiding American citizen.
No matter how hard the national news media try to bully and cow us into submission, NRA members will never, ever waver in defense of the individual liberty of every single law-abiding American.
Together, we will always stand as “Freedom’s Safest Place.”
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