by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
A “special report” by ABC’s Diane Sawyer headlined “Young Guns” was heavily panned by gun rights advocates who asserted she used some faulty data and that producers of the segment did something monumentally stupid by putting children in a room with unloaded guns to see what they would do when the firearms were discovered.
According to Newsbusters, Sawyer and reporter David Muir went after gun ownership “in the most absurd manner possible.” Guns left in “ridiculous, staged locations” were shown and children at a Florida elementary school were essentially gulled into an “experiment” in which unloaded guns were “jammed in backpacks and in a box of plastic spiders.” The teacher in charge of that so-called experiment told children she had to leave the room but that there was candy on the table.
Sawyer alluded to a new study from Pediatrics that said 7,391 children are taken to hospitals annually with gunshot wounds and that 453 of them die from those wounds.
ABC also reported that in 2010, 98 “American kids under age 18” died in accidental shootings. That same year, 1,337 “American kids under age 18” died from gunshot wounds.
But according to the Centers for Disease Control, “seven teens ages 16 to 19 died every day from motor vehicle injuries.” The CDC reported that in 2010, “about 2,700 teens in the United States aged 16–19 were killed and almost 282,000 were treated and released from emergency departments for injuries suffered in motor-vehicle crashes.”
Conservative talk show host Dana Loesch went on the warpath against the report, and The Blaze asserted that Sawyer’s report failed to mention that the deaths it pointed to “include ‘children’ up to the age of 20 and the overwhelming majority of them were crime-related and not accidents in the home.”
Coincidentally, Examiner.com reported that when Loesch reportedly was going to be tagged to do a guest host segment of “The View,” Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts tried to block her appearance.
Watts tweeted that Loesch was “not (an) appropriate guest” for the program because she would “promote lies about guns.” Sawyer’s career in broadcasting spans almost 50 years; she started at a Kentucky TV station in 1967. Then she was part of President Nixon’s White House team, before becoming the lead for ABC specials.
