NYT - The Assault Weapon Myth

Gray Lady Down
(jenriks.de)

After twenty years of constant lies, the New York Times admits to The Assault Weapon Myth. 

"It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year."
      New York Times, The Assault Weapon Myth, Lois Beckett, Sep 12, 2014  

Thanks for that blinding flash of the obvious. The Times was also shocked to learn:

"Most Americans do not know that gun homicides have decreased by 49 percent since 1993 as violent crime also fell, though rates of gun homicide in the United States are still much higher than those in other developed nations. A Pew survey conducted after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., found that 56 percent of Americans believed wrongly that the rate of gun crime was higher than it was 20 years ago."

No responsibility is assigned for those misperceptions; although gun-rights advocates such as the NRA and Dr John Lott have long been scorned in the pages of the NYT for pointing out those facts. America's tattered "Paper of Record" ignores its complicity in withholding or dismissing that information. Interestingly, the author also refrains from any mention the decades of growth in lawful concealed carry. By ignoring CCWs, the NYT is unconscionably hiding their apparent effect of reducing violence and spree killings. It's simply not in line with the NYT's progressive narrative.  

 “We spent a whole bunch of time and a whole bunch of political capital yelling and screaming about assault weapons,” Mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu of New Orleans said. He called it a “zero sum political fight about a symbolic weapon.”

Similarly, there's no mention of the gun-rights community that invested "a whole bunch of time and a whole bunch of political capital" to successfully fight those unsupported infringements of everyone's rights. True to form, the NYT continues their biased, one-sided reportage by suppressing facts that do not support their narrative.

The Times does telegraph a shift of policy:

"More than 20 years of research funded by the Justice Department has found that programs to target high-risk people or places, rather than targeting certain kinds of guns, can reduce gun violence."  "...and building on successes in other cities, New Orleans is now identifying the young men most at risk and intervening to help them get jobs."

Sounds expensive -- and intrusive. Again, no mention of the proven techniques of arrest, prosecution and incarceration. Just more feel-good bureaucratic programs, several of which have already failed dangerously in the LA area, including one highly touted effort where the Feds and State were essentially funding a murderous drug gang. What could (not) go wrong?

Selecting one of my extensive collection of tin-foil hats: this all seems worrisome. These initiatives could bring yet another facet to the burgeoning surveillance culture. Does anyone else sense the dangers in the government "identifying the young men most at risk"? The Obama administration is already targeting veterans and Tea Party activists. With that targeting could logically come attempts to eliminate fundamental rights. California's Governor currently has a bill on his desk that would strip an individual's rights based on nothing more than a suspicion. Bills that would automatically eliminate 2nd Amendment Rights for being placed on the nebulous Terror Watch List are continuously being discussed.

(Full Disclosure: I've been on the Terror Watch List -- for a false positive swipe of my CPAP machine. I latter asked one of the TSA Barneys annoying me how I could get off the damn list: "Canz tell yah, iz a sekrut!"   *Sigh*)

Unfortunately, it may be easier to demonize a person or group than an inanimate object.

We must remain forever vigilant.   


HT: Mark Vanderberg, Gun Rights Advocate Podcast


[Update:] Hmm... on the same day, essentially the same story as the New York Times' appeared in the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire: Finally Waving the White Flag on the Assault Weapons Ban. Coincidence?