The Liberal Media's Top 10 Worst Anti-Gun Moments of the Year
In the immediate aftermath of the Navy Yard shooting the liberal media reflexively began their push for more gun control. NBC’s Matt Lauer, on Tuesday’s Today show pressed an outspoken chief medical officer that treated some of the wounded: “You say you didn’t want to wade into the issue of gun control and yet your comments are resonating with people...but we also heard emotional comments after Newtown and Aurora, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Are you worried that your comments will be soon forgotten, as it seems some of those other comments have been forgotten?”
Lauer’s plea to the doctor represents how desperate the liberal media has been to keep the gun control issue alive, even in the face of recent political losses like the defeat of Barack Obama’s gun control legislation in Congress and the recall of anti-gun state legislators in Colorado.
Ever since the tragic Newtown school shooting the liberal media has been on anti-gun crusade. On the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks reporters slanted their initial post-Newtown stories against gun rights by an 8 to 1 margin and on the cable networks the gun rights supporters were demonized by the likes of CNN’s Piers Morgan and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
The following is a video compilation of The Liberal Media’s Top 10 Worst Anti-Gun Moments of the Year:
10. Senators Against Expanded Gun Control Have Blood On Their Hands
Panelist Donny Deutsch: “I want to go back to these Senators. Unfortunately, the next time a crazy, or somebody who would have not gotten a gun from a background check, kills somebody, I want to know what their response is going to be, because they literally have blood on their hands....They have blood on their hands. It’s that simple. There’s no gray, no abstract here. It is literally the dots are that connected.”
Co-host Mika Brzezinski: “I agree. I agree completely....This country — I mean, it’s being led by a bunch of buffoons, I have to tell you.”
— MSNBC’s Morning Joe, May 3.
9. Taking on “the Gun Lobby” Like “Defeating the Nazis”
“Surely, finding Osama bin Laden; surely passing civil rights legislation, as Lyndon Johnson was able to do; and before that, surely, defeating the Nazis, was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby. This is a turning point in this country....Unless we figure out a way to make sure that something like Newtown never happens again, we’re not the country that we once were.”
— CBS’s Bob Schieffer during live coverage of Obama’s gun control speech, Jan. 16.
8. PBS Host Wants to “Throw Up” Over Gun Bill Failure
“You’re telling me on April 15, 2013, a few months after Newtown, it is possible, it is conceivable that this year might end without an assault weapons ban and without legislation that guarantees background checks?...That makes me want to throw up, but I can’t do that on national television, so I’ll keep it in until I get off camera in three minutes.”
— Host Tavis Smiley to socialist Senator Bernie Sanders on PBS’s Tavis Smiley, April 15.
7. Not About Individual Liberty, Just Corporate Greed
“Can we just break through the B.S. here? This is not, for the NRA, about Second Amendment rights....This is about gun manufacturers making millions and millions and millions of dollars. This is about retailers making millions and millions and millions of dollars. Do you know how much money these people have made over the slaughter of 20 innocents in Newtown? Do you know how much richer these rich gun manufacturers have gotten over the past month, and how the NRA uses that tragedy to gin up fears, and Web sites use that tragedy to gin up fears, that they’re coming to take your guns away?”
— Co-host Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, January 11.
6. Piers Morgan Sneers At Pro-Gun Guest Citing Constitution; ‘You Brandish Your Little Book’
Host Piers Morgan: “The way that the NRA through the ’80s and ’90s and this last decade have deliberately tried to frame this as a left-wing attack on the American Constitution and the Second Amendment — it’s exactly what you’ve tried to do. You come in, you brandish your little book [holds up book] as if I don’t know what’s in that-”
Author Ben Shapiro: “My little book? That’s the Constitution of the United States.”
— Exchange on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, January 10.
5. You’re Either With Obama, or With the Killers
“I personally don’t want to be part of a movement to keep those semi-automatics flying into the hands of all sorts of people as they are today, the hoarders, the survivalists, the paranoid, the criminal and downright politically nutty. Why? Because the next mass shooter could well emerge out of this pack. Check the shooters of John F. Kennedy and Jerry Ford, who got shot at twice. Look at the men that shot Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and George Wallace. They all had political motives and they all had guns. Got them easy and put them easily to use. And if you’re not against this movement, you’re with it.”
— Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, February 27.
4. Piers Morgan Savages “Unbelievably Stupid” Gun Rights Advocate
Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt: “I honestly don’t understand why you would rather have people be victims of a crime than be able to defend themselves. It’s incomprehensible.”
CNN host Piers Morgan: “You’re an unbelievably stupid man, aren’t you?...You have absolutely no coherent argument whatsoever....You don’t give a damn, do you, about the gun murder rate in America?...I know why sales of these weapons have been soaring in the last few days. It’s down to idiots like you. Mr. Pratt.... You are a dangerous man espousing dangerous nonsense. And you shame your country.”
— From the imported British host’s anti-gun tirade on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight, December 18, 2012.
3. Doesn’t the NRA Really Want More Mass Shootings?
“NRA membership booms in these moments. Gun sales boom in these moments. Bushmaster [rifle] sales are booming. In the wake of the Gabby Giffords shooting, Glocks boomed. So in a perverse way — they would never admit this publicly — but in a perverse way, these moments are actually good for them. So then, how do we expect them to really not want these moments?”
— Co-host Touré on MSNBC’s The Cycle, December 20, 2012.
2. Bashir Smears: NRA Is the Real Hitler in Gun Debate
“As the gun lobby has armed its barricades since that horrific shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, one of the arguments that they continue to use against any kind of regulation is to unashamedly invoke the name of Adolf Hitler. Supporters of the NRA say that history proves tyrannical leaders begin by robbing law-abiding citizens of their firearms....Of course, for a nation hell bent on genocide, Hitler did not allow the Jews to possess firearms, but virtually everyone else was free to do so. Which I guess turns this story on its head. Because if anyone deserves to be equated with Hitler on the issue of firearms, then it’s not the President, it’s the NRA.”
— MSNBC’s Martin Bashir, January 14.
1. Soledad O’Brien to Gun Rights Activist: ‘Your Position Completely Boggles Me’
“You said it’s time to get rid of gun laws, like the takeaway for you from this massacre at an elementary school is it’s time to get rid of gun laws. How does that possibly make sense to you?...How you can say that people should have fewer laws, and not more, I think is — it just boggles the mind, honestly, and if you were to come here and talk to the people in this town [of Newtown], they’d be stunned by you....I appreciate you talking with me this morning, but I just — I have to say, your position — your position completely boggles me, honestly. I just do not understand it.”
— Anchor Soledad O’Brien to economist and author John Lott on CNN’s Starting Point, December 17, 2012.
— Geoffrey Dickens is Deputy Research Director at the Media Research Center. Follow Geoffrey Dickens on Twitter.
