Media Hysteria Fuels Anti-Gun Panic

People with firearms at the Washington state capitol during the 'March for Our Rights' pro-gun rally in Olympia, Wash., on April 21, 2018. Jason Redmond/AFP/Getty Images

Commentary

Emotionalism is the worst way to deal with policies. Yet it’s the main force behind the media hysteria pushing gun control. Especially by the Los Angeles Times, the main gun-control force in California. This is shown by two recent opinion articles they ran.

Calina Ciobanu, a teacher and writer in Los Angeles, on Feb. 10 described a harrowing incident in the California desert. A man with a gun stopped her, but soon she raced away:

I didn’t realize it until much later, but I survived by the breadth of a breath. I had been leaning forward in my seat. The bullet went through my backrest and hit a spring. The body of the bullet went right, and a sliver of a fragment hit me when it deflected left. I ended up with a grotesque bruise and scrape the size of a fist on my back and the lingering effects of the trauma in my body and my brain.

That’s horrible. I’m sorry it happened to her.

Then she wrote the man later was convicted of this crime and, “I know that the man who shot at me was a person with a felony record who shouldn’t have been in possession of a firearm. I know that the night before I came across him on the road, he pulled a gun on police, leading them in pursuit and evading arrest.”

But then she asked, “I also know that I was the predictable victim of a political system that has allowed close to 400 million guns to flood every part of our country.”

A surveillance image shows a suspect during an armed robbery in Norco, Calif., on July 31, 2022. Riverside Sheriff's Department via AP

That’s a non-sequitur. First, if the man was a felon who obtained a gun even though he couldn’t legally possess one, why does she think any new law could prevent that?

Second, how does she think 400 million guns could be confiscated?

Third, if somehow all those guns—or most of them—could be confiscated, attempted carjackings like this, and successful carjackings, would be more common, not less. That’s because carjackers would be more certain their potential victims would be disarmed.

She wrote of the carjacker:

But my rage is not reserved for him. My rage is reserved for the courts that place greater value on an antiquated interpretation of the 2nd Amendment than they do on human lives. My rage is reserved for the politicians who fail to pass common sense gun reforms, including universal background checks and assault weapons bans, that would make all of us safer.

Actually, there already are background checks, except for private transfers, such as a father giving his son a gun. “Assault weapons” are just mean-looking rifles, so banning them would mean banning all rifles.

And the courts only reflect the will of the voters, who consistently have opposed major gun-control laws. For example, after the 1994 “assault weapons” ban was passed by the Democratic Congress, voters turned the majority over to gun-rights Republicans. And Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because she was a gun-controller, and Donald Trump was not. Trump then put on the U.S. Supreme Court three Second Amendment backers, leading to last year’s New York Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen decision (pdf) supporting a broad interpretation of that amendment.

A Colt AR-15 on the counter of a gun store in a file photograph. Thomas Cooper/Getty Images

She concluded by citing 19,384 gun-caused murders last year, and asked, “Why do we keep allowing this?” Well, for one thing, after the 2012 Sandy Hook Massacre, President Obama ordered a study of gun violence, “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.” It found:

Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997).

School Gun Violence

On Feb. 16 the L.A. Times ran another anti-gun column, “A school threat. Do you send you child or keep them home?” by Anita Chabria, the paper’s California columnist. Again, I’m sympathetic to her plight. She wrote:

The call came at 7 a.m., before I had enough coffee in me to process it: A recorded message from the principal of my daughter’s high school, informing us of a credible threat.

There wasn’t too much detail, just that the police had contacted her about a Facebook post that named the school. Classes would go on as usual, with extra security.

Now what? I thought. And she asked, “Why are we centering gun rights over our right not to die, not to bury our children? Even more pervasive, over our right to not be afraid?

First responders secure Santa Ana High School as parents and family members wait for students on lockdown after threats against the school in Santa Ana, Calif., on March 10, 2022. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Then this:

It is a powerlessness many of us feel, made infuriating by a Supreme Court apparently so dismissive of its own intellect (and ours) that its conservative majority believes everything worth deciding was finalized by white men in the era of muskets and slavery — an originalist mentality as self-serving as it is cruel.

Although she’s supposed to be a journalist, she obviously didn’t read this part of the Bruen decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, a black man who grew up in the Jim Crow South, on p. 52:

[P]ublic carry was a component of the right to keep and bear arms—a right free blacks were often denied in antebellum America.

After the Civil War, of course, the exercise of this fundamental right by freed slaves was systematically thwarted. This Court has already recounted some of the Southern abuses violating blacks’ right to keep and bear arms. See McDonald, 561 U. S., at 771 (noting the “systematic efforts” made to disarm blacks). ... see also S. Exec. Doc. No. 43, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 8 (1866) (“Pistols, old muskets, and shotguns were taken away from [freed slaves] as such weapons would be wrested from the hands of lunatics”).

In the years before the 39th Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, the Freedmen’s Bureau regularly kept it abreast of the dangers to blacks and Union men in the postbellum South. The reports described how blacks used publicly carried weapons to defend themselves and their communities. For example, the Bureau reported that a teacher from a Freedmen’s school in Maryland had written to say that, because of attacks on the school, “[b]oth the mayor and sheriff have warned the colored people to go armed to school, (which they do,)” and that the “[t]he superintendent of schools came down and brought [the teacher] a revolver” for his protection. ... see also H. R. Exec. Doc. No. 68, 39th Cong., 2d Sess., 91 (1867) (noting how, during the New Orleans riots, blacks under attack “defended themselves ... with such pistols as they had”). Contrary to what Chabria wrote, it’s gun control that’s racist, not gun rights. Guns are not the prerogative only of “white men in the era of muskets and slavery,” but of everybody. It’s guns owned by blacks today that protect their rights.

Black Lives Matter demonstrators pose with guns in support of the Second Amendment during an open carry rally in Richmond, Va., on August 15, 2020. Eze Amos/Getty Images

I realize this almost inevitably can be an emotional issue. But facts are facts. And it’s been annoying in my 36 years out here writing about California that the L.A. Times keeps pushing to take away our gun rights, a major reason why the state Legislature has passed 100 anti-gun bills in recent years. Well, at least we have an alternative in the newspaper you’re now reading.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.