Anti-gun group lies about GAO report

June 19, 9:10 AMGun Rights ExaminerDavid Codrea

Previous Next

12 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Gun Rights Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

 Courtesy Oleg Volk, A Human Right

Over 90 Percent of Mexican Crime Guns Originate in U.S., New GAO Report Finds

That's the headline from the Violence Policy Center press release. It is a premeditated lie.

True, the qualifier "traced by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) over the last three years" is admitted in the body of the release, but even that doesn't tell a reader the number of guns withheld by Mexican authorities--or whether the ones submitted have been randomly selected or cherry-picked.

Headlines are important. Often times while scanning through news, that is all that will be noticed or retained. They are also crafted to facilitate SEO--search engine optimization--and thus the likelihood that a piece will feature prominently in searches to maximize traffic. Skilled press release writers know this, and VPC has been issuing press releases for a long time.

In other words, a media professional wrote a headline knowing it was false. The press release was authorized. The VPC legal director is quoted, so we also know it was vetted. The lie was not only calculated, it was sanctioned. And the perpetrators are counting on two things: media complicity and us not knowing any better.

It's not surprising to see VPC rely once more on deception. Their executive director and founder Josh Sugarmann admitted as much in a report crafted to gin up support for banning semi-automatic firearms:

The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these guns."

William R. Tonso of reasononline put it in perspective:

So back in 1988, one of the nation's leading gun prohibitionists was banking on public support for restrictions on "semi-automatic assault weapons," not because Americans were informed about the guns in question, but because they were uninformed and likely to remain so. Sugarmann, now executive director of the Violence Policy Center, could rely on the public's continuing confusion because he knew he would have the help of the nation's leading news organizations. During the next few years the major TV networks, newspapers, and magazines persistently misled the public about the capabilities of "assault weapons," falsely implied that the guns have no legitimate use, and ignored the Second Amendment issues at stake. Given the intensity of this misinformation, it is hardly surprising that polls find some 70 percent of Americans support the "assault weapon" ban approved by Congress last year.

And that, of course, is what they're still going after. Chillingly, VPC's conclusion in this latest PR, “With the stroke of a pen the Obama Administration could stop the import of a significant percentage of the guns being sought by Mexican gun traffickers," is reminiscent of a dictatorial executive branch lauded by former Clinton advisor Paul Begala:

''Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool.''

There is nothing "cool" about liars.