The mainstream, anti-gun media lies a lot.
They don’t necessarily make up things, of course. They might misrepresent the truth, which might be intentional or might just be from ignorance, but actually fabricating things? That doesn’t happen nearly as often as many of us might like to believe.
No, they tend to be great at the lie of omission.
That’s when they leave out a lot of information that might run counter to a particular narrative. For example, let’s take this piece from Rolling Stone as a prime example. They’re not the paragon of journalistic integrity they might want to appear, of course–see the “A Rape on Campus” controversy for an example–but they do try to pretend they are.
And they published this screed titled, “White, Legally Armed, and Primed for Political Violence.”
In it, they tie Ian Rogers, who was convicted of conspiracy and illegal weapons possession in 2021 after planning multiple attacks against targets he and his buddy believed were enemies of Donald Trump, and Vance Boelter, the man accused of assassinating a Minnesota lawmaker and trying to assassinate another, and try to blame the gun industry for it all.
Shockingly, of course.
They cite Smith & Wesson, referring to their AR-15 as a “combat proven design” and how Rogers credited the NRA as the only reason we can even have guns today.
Yet they barely mention leftist violence at all, and when they finally did, it was like this:
any white male gun owners do not neatly conform to this archetype, including enigmatic individuals like Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump last year, and Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Still, according to Angela Stroud, a sociologist and author of Good Guys With Guns, white men have more than any other group been “thoroughly inculcated with a culture of entitlement.” And yet, she says, “it is also true that white men have not kept up in this economy, even though they’ve been taught throughout history that they’re going to have access to prosperity and power. So what you have is a sense of aggrieved entitlement, and that, in combination with guns, is extremely dangerous.” At the same time, Stroud adds, “The gun industry will do anything to sell you this product. The more fear the better. And in a culture that is becoming void of meaning for many people — the loss of work, community, religion — you can see how someone is not content to be a passive believer; they want to be a doer.”
As a white man, I was never taught I’d have access to prosperity and power, so I don’t know where Stroud got this crap from, but if that’s what she’s passing off as scholarship, we can disregard literally everything she has to say on anything.
Rolling Stone, to their credit, did reach out to the NRA for comment, though they declined to respond for what are probably obvious reasons. After all, this is Rolling Stone. Does anyone think they were ever going to offer a fair report? Anything the NRA said would be misrepresented, reframed, or dismissed by some so-called expert without the organization getting a chance for rebuttal.
We all know it.
But yeah, they did make at least a feable attempt to get the NRA’s side to some degree.
Yet the overall point here is that they focused primarily on these two individuals, one of whom no one has ever heard of and who may well have mostly been talking smack with his buddy. I’m not excusing what Rogers did, because he also may have fully intended to carry out these attacks, but he didn’t actually do it before being caught.
Unlike Luigi Mangione allegedly did.
Ryan Wesley Routh, though, didn’t get a mention at all. He was the second would-be Trump assassin and is conveniently missing from this narrative. Also missing are the legions of people who burned numerous communities over the actions of a small group of police officers in Minnesota or the illegal immigrant who burned Jewish protestors–and they weren’t even quite that–because he didn’t like Israel.
Also missing is the anti-semitic attack against the governor of Pennsylvania.
Are those different because they didn’t involve guns? Or are they different because they can’t be conveniently used to attack the right, the gun industry, or anything else that the folks at Rolling Stone don’t like?
On every level, this particular piece is a gross misrepresentation of the facts, leaving out anything that’s inconvenient, cherry-picking “experts” who will give them the line they want to hear, and pretending that this is what unbiased journalism looks like.
It’s full of lies of omission, using others to outright lie, and in the end, shows that Rolling Stone hasn’t moved on from the environment that allowed “A Rape on Campus” to get published in the first place.
