Agenda-driven research and reporting serve power elites, not public interest

We would know what works and doesn’t in terms of “gun control” if only the National Rifle Association hadn’t employed “a tactic of fear” and killed Congressional funding for research. That’s the message Dr. Mark Rosenberg, former director of the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control put forth, and that ProPublica’s Joaquin Sapien accepted without question (let alone challenge). His Feb. 25 Q&A with Rosenberg, presented as “ongoing” investigative journalism, reads more like a fake infomercial “interview” to anyone who’s been watching the debate and has seen old tricks before.

Absent from Sapien’s fawning setups and lobbed softballs is any hint of curiosity as to what Rosenberg meant when he declared to The Washington Post back in 1994 “"We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. Now it [sic] is dirty, deadly, and banned."

Conveniently, that’s not even brought up.

“There were basically four questions that we were trying to answer,” Rosenberg told Sapien, defining what he sees as the problem, its causes, preventive interventions and edicts to be imposed(referred to here as “programs” and “policies”).

Absent was any acknowledgment that defensive gun uses may also have a public health impact, and a positive one at that. Rosenberg is not interested in exploring that issue, because then he’d have to confront overwhelming evidence that guns in moral hands save lives, that normalization of carrying firearms deters violence, that criminals make rational choices when it comes to saving their own skin and picking easier prey, and that taking bad guys out often means future victimizations won’t happen and we’ll all be better off. Alternative data presented by Wright-Rossi, Lott, Kleck and even the Bureau of Justice Statistics don’t exist in this universe, because those works don’t advance Rosenberg’s desired citizen disarmament goals.

Instead, the Rosenberg/Sapien tag team validates Mark Twain’s observation about statistics by making no attempt to separate lawful gun ownership and use from criminal possession and abuse, as if the “danger of guns in the home” argument applies equally to peaceable gun owners and gang-affiliated crack dealers. And the suicide argument fails to acknowledge the much higher rate among the very police the monopoly of violence crowd thinks should be the “only ones” with guns.

Those are pretty glaring holes for something representing itself as an unbiased presentation, as opposed to an advocacy piece. But then, Pulitzer notwithstanding, we’re talking about a “news” organization headed by a billionaire “progressive” that gets foundation grants from the likes of George Soros' Open Society Foundations, and partners with all the right “Authorized Journalists” (or as Joe Biden likes to call them, “legitimate media”).

So when ProPublica advises us on “The Best Reporting on Guns in America,” naturally they steer their readers to those basta … uh … bastions of neutrality, The New York Times and The Washington Post. “Fast and Furious” to them, naturally, was “a sting gone awry” and a “failed operation” (funny -- they don’t say that any whistleblowers talked to them). And for the best reporting on that, they recommend Katherine Eban’s Fortune hit piece (since thoroughly discredited by federal agents, and ultimately, by the clearing of and praise for whistleblower John Dodson by ATF management).

As with so much coming from the self-designated “progressives” (as if returning to centralized bureaucratic rule on everything isn’t actually a regression), there’s an opposite twist to everything they do. You’d think if they were really “pro publica,” that is, for the public, and if they were really working in that public’s interest, they’d understand power to the people also means in the hands of the people, not a monopoly of violence that is beyond challenge when those wielding it become abusive.

After all, it’s the right of the people to keep and bear arms. That doesn’t sit well with those who insist on dictating when it comes to individual choices they don’t approve of.

Forcing “we the people” to fund apparatchiks like Rosenberg so his political “results” can be used to infringe on our rights, diminish our power and further the control interests of those pulling the strings and holding the reins is hardly public-spirited -- it’s actually more like an ideological, in-your-face bullet fee. And these foundation-funded beneficiaries, these tools of the elites, these administration true believers and these Fourth Estate Fifth Columnists, who ensure their places of influence and favor through their services, would have you believe they’re the egalitarians.

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