by Dave Workman | Senior Editor
The Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) recently squared off against the broadcast and print media, blasting news agencies for repeatedly blaming the ongoing carnage in Chicago on “gun violence” when there are clear indications that recent homicides involving children have been gang related.
SAF looked at broadcast and print media coverage of the past weekend’s slayings and found repeated examples of what SAF considers anti-gun media bias.
SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb said a cursory glance at coverage of Chicago’s mayhem and murder found that USA Today, for example, called the recent slayings of three children ‘an ugly spasm of gun violence’ while acknowledging in the next paragraph that the weekend murders of three children happened because they ‘were caught in gang-related gunfire.’ He said that the guns ‘didn’t pull their own triggers.’
A Chicago Tribune reporter has issued a “humble plea” to Barack and Michelle Obama to “come home and fight the gun violence that plagues Chicago.” The reporter also acknowledged that the killings of children had “likely ties to gang conflicts.’
NBC News reported that anti-gun Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel had met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Feb. 13 ‘to discuss federal help to fight gun violence’.”
The term “gun violence” is a creation of the gun prohibition lobby that the dominant media have included in their lexicon. Gun rights advocates have repeatedly challenged the press to define the difference between a criminal attack with a firearm and one with a knife, blunt object or vehicle. More people are killed every year with blunt instruments or bare hands than with rifles and shotguns combined, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report.
Yet, the dominant media will only use the term “gun violence.” The term appears in rhetoric about the number of people who die annually from gunshot wounds, a figure that invariably includes suicides and accidents to provide a more dramatic impression that thousands of people are gunned down each year. About two-thirds of people who die from gunshot wounds in any given year are suicides.
In Washington State, the figure is closer to 80 percent. Instead of 30,000 deaths annually from “gun violence,” the homicide figure over the past several years has been below 10,000, according to FBI data.
Gottlieb’s message was blunt: “It’s not ‘gun violence,’ it’s ‘gang violence.’”
“This is head-in-the-sand political correctness run amok,” he said in a prepared statement. “The press is living in denial. Their reluctance to admit that the problem is gangs is at best irresponsible. The press appears loath to blame decades of bad public policy for the current situation. By subliminally perpetuating the impression that guns, rather than gangs and their mindless hatred are responsible for the savagery that now plagues some Chicago neighborhoods, the dominant media has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.”
