Firearms: What the Mainstream Won’t Tell You

If I’ve discovered one thing in the past few years it’s that the media has become totally politicized — left, right, and in-between. How does this affect reporting? Quite simply, far too many in the media tell lies, lots of lies. I’m not talking about different points of view arising from political beliefs. No, the motives are far deeper. These folks are supposedly professional journalists who can and should suppress their personal beliefs to report the truth, or at least a reasonably close version of the truth. They have direct access to the truth because they have access to original sources. But they either distort the truth or completely ignore it because their ideology demands it. 

The left, of course, are more likely to distort because they are true ideologues. I suppose they can’t help themselves. But there are others, even some on the political right who distort because…well, it’s so easy to do so. These include the so-called fiscal conservatives along with many libertarians, who are driven solely by a kind of conservatism that lacks any moral foundation. Their only real concern is economic growth. Now, economic growth is a good thing because it ensures growth in jobs, wages, business expansion — all good things. But when growth is sought as a desired end and virtually any means are considered acceptable to achieve it, we find major corporations happy to do business with oppressive, corrupt nations like Communist China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, to name just a few. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an organization that does the bidding of major corporations, is happy to encourage increases in low-wage immigration at the expense of American workers and ignores the real engines of growth, the small and mid-sized companies of America. 

If you avoid the mainstream media and search instead for original sources, you’ll uncover information that will likely alter your view of what’s actually true. Here are a few examples, all related to the current political effort to disarm American citizens and overturn the 2nd Amendment:

• Guess which number is larger: the number of children shot in Chicago during 2021 or the number of children who died of COVID in the entire country during 2021? The truth which, by the way, comes directly from the Center for Disease Control, a federal agency: 261 children were shot in Chicago so far this year, while 214 children died of COVID-19 in the entire United States during the same period. COVID, then, is far less dangerous to children (age 17 and under) than living in Chicago. If we counted the number of children shot throughout the entire country the difference would be far more dramatic. Oh, yes, these children and virtually everyone shot in Chicago was shot not by someone with a legally owned firearm, but by gang-bangers and other criminals who own guns obtained illegally. 

• We've also heard a lot lately about the dreaded AR-15, a style of rifle that has  become the most popular sporting rifle among gunowners in the US. I've actually heard some in the media state that the AR stands for "Assault Rifle" or "Automatic Rifle." Both are highly inaccurate. Those two letters actually stand for  ArmaLite Rifle. ArmaLite was the company back in the 1950s that first developed the rifle that evolved into the AR-15. The civilian versions, the kind you and I can buy if we like, are not assault weapons, primarily because they are not automatic weapons. They are instead semi-automatic, which means when you pull the trigger one round is fired. This is really no different from the double-action .38 caliber revolver or .45 semi-automatic pistol I used to carry when I flew in the Navy. There's an awful lot of misinformation in the news about AR-15s.

• OK, speaking of rifles, here's another question...Are more people killed by rifles or by knives? According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, far more people (3 1/2 times as many) were killed by knives than were killed by rifles. In 2020 a total of 454 people were killed by rifles, while 1,732 died as a result of stabbings or hackings by knives or other cutting instruments. If you add shotguns to the "rifle" numbers, the total rises to 657, still less than one-half the number killed by knives. And, even more interesting, over 600 people were killed by "fists, hands, and feet" during 2020. 

• Another guessing game — guess what percentage of new gun owners are women? Here’s the answer. Between January 2019 and April 2021, 7.5 million Americans became new gun owners, and 3.5 million of them were women. I’ll bet you won’t find that statistic in the mainstream media. But that’s not all you’ll never see. For example, while 55% of new gun owners were white, 21% were Black and 19% were Hispanic. To demonstrate the dramatic change, one that shows the impact of out-of-control crime, of the almost 20 million existing gun owners who bought firearms in 2019, 71% were male and 74% were white. In other words, women, Blacks, and Hispanics no longer trust our defunded and depleted police forces to defend them, but have decided to defend themselves from an out-of-control criminal element. 

• Okay, one more…Guess who killed more criminals during the commission of crimes, the police or private citizens who possessed legally owned firearms? According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for 2020, armed private citizens killed more criminals during the commission of felonies than were killed by police. For a variety of reasons, this is to be expected. First, the police often don’t arrive until after the criminal has left the scene. Second, more Americans are now armed and will defend their lives and property from those who threaten them with violence. Of course, no sane person wants to use deadly force, but neither does he or she want to be wounded or murdered during a criminal attack. We all have the right to defend ourselves and those who depend on us to protect them, which is why political efforts to disarm law-abiding citizens are so wrong. Ironically, and hypocritically, legislators and others among the elites who scream so loudly for so-called “gun control” are most often surrounded by paid and well-armed bodyguards. Yes, indeed, what’s good for them must be denied to the rest of us.

As you can see, there's a lot of "fake news" and other disinformation in the media, especially when it comes to firearms. 

Yes, I’m a member of the clergy who follows Church teaching and believes individuals have the right to defend themselves and their families from the mayhem and increased criminality plaguing our nation. Here’s what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say:

Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm. For this reason, those who legitimately hold authority also have the right to use arms to repel aggressors against the civil community entrusted to their responsibility [CCC 2265].

Although this applies to the defense of the community, it apples as well to the defense of the family. A husband and father, for example, has the right to protect his wife and children from harm, even if doing so demands the application of lethal force. The Catechism also includes the following:

Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow: If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful…Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s [CCC 2264].

The word of the Mainstream Media

Mainstreamed word

Straightjacket bound, witless, enslaved,

Plugged, budded into a formless,

meaningless world, to offer all 

Its fanciful, unholy word,

As the truth strolls by unseen.

In measured tones, past perfect teeth,

From an alphabet of sexes,

A kaleidoscope of faces,

Prepackaged lies fed to hollow,

Unseeking minds and ill-formed hearts.

Finger clicks reveal the echoes 

Of a subtle and false command,

Consistently calling to spread

Division to those near and dear, 

So all will share their hellish fate.

Embrace our word. Reject traces

Of all the truth you’ve ever known.

The music plays, tuneless and coarse,

Inviting each: Step to the dance, 

Come, stagger together to death.

Kerry at the Convention

Good heavens! I thought John Kerry had taken his wife’s dowry and completely retired to his little mansion on Nantucket where he could contemplate his lifetime of public failures. But no, just as he did back in his Vietnam days, he resurfaced and made headlines. Of course, as a young officer on swift boats in the Mekong delta, all John Kerry did was convince his peers that his primary mission was to shop for medals. These were the same medals he publicly tossed away at that antiwar rally while he cozied up to Ho Chi Minh’s favorite actress, Jane Fonda, and told nasty lies about his comrades in arms. But then, just when you thought he was permanently out of sight, John appeared at the virtual Democrat convention to speak fondly of himself, of Barack Obama...Oh, yes, and of Joe Biden. 

A Protesting John Kerry

As he has throughout his political career, Kerry told several whoppers last night. The biggest? He reminded the nation how he and Obama, and presumably with the blessing and moral support of Joe Biden, "eliminated the threat of an Iran with a nuclear weapon." This was, of course, a lie and Kerry knows it. If he doesn't, he's a bigger fool than most of us think. The agreement with Iran -- a, non-binding, unconstitutional agreement since it did not receive Senate ratification as a treaty -- asked Iran only to delay its development of nuclear weapons. It certainly did not "eliminate the threat." In return for this meaningless delay, Obama-Kerry removed all sanctions and gave the murderous Iranian regime a huge pile of untraceable cash subsequently used to finance terrorist activity throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. The result of the agreement? Iran continued to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems while supporting worldwide Islamist terrorism, and did all these wondrous things thanks to funds provided by U.S. taxpayers. Aren't we proud?

This appeasement of Iran brought to mind a comment by Winston Churchill, the statesman most despised by President Obama:

Another lie involved his claim that the Obama administration put together that multi-nation coalition to destroy ISIS. Yes, there was a coalition but it had little effect on ISIS, and certainly didn’t “destroy” it. In fact, by pulling out of Iraq, the Obama administration turned the “J-V Team” into the Varsity that went on to control large parts of the Middle East and extend its terrorist activities. It took the aggressive anti-ISIS policies of the Trump administration to destroy ISIS. And how about Libya, Mr. Secretary of State? Oh, yeah. I guess that debacle occurred under your predecessor, the equally incompetent Hilary Clinton. All that “leading from behind” can be a real challenge if the folks in front decide to go in a different direction. Like Russia invading the Ukraine and taking over Crimea while the US watched and did nothing to help. How did Obama put it to Russian President, Dimitri Medvedev, back in March of 2012? “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” And two years later, after that election, Russia invaded.

There’s also Kerry’s ludicrous claim that the Obama administration stopped Ebola before it became a pandemic. Talk about apples and oranges. Unlike COVID-19, that was airmailed to us and the rest of the world thanks to the policies of the Chinese Communist Party, Ebola was pretty much confined to parts of West Africa. I believe there were less than a dozen U.S. cases. 

Rewriting history is always a dangerous game, especially when those who lived it are still alive and can refute revisionist claims. 

Communist China and Other Liars

There's a lot of public and private lying going on today. This always happens when a crisis arises. When the going gets tough, the incompetent and lazy and self-centered simply lie.

The lies of the self-important are usually designed to deflect attention from their current and past incompetence to the real or imagined mistakes of others. Once the crisis hits, they realize, or others make them realize, that their incompetence either caused or aggravated the crisis. Such knowledge, of course, must be hidden from the public. Hide the truth, identify a suitable scapegoat, and attack it aggressively. The truth, of course, is hard to hide, so this works for only a while. Eventually the truth becomes known. 

Sadly, the self-important, which include many politicians and most of the national media, are the least of our problems. The most dangerous of today's liars are not incompetent; they're simply evil. Perhaps the best example are the Chinese Communists.

The Chinese Communist Party really can't be called a political party because it's the only party permitted in China. Indeed, if you tried to start an actual political party in China, you would surely be arrested and likely imprisoned...if you were lucky. 

It's important to be aware of this, a key identifier of all totalitarian states. No totalitarian government, whether based on ideology or a cult of personality, can tolerate intellectual or political competition since it will always lose the argument. It must reject the very idea of truth, because it never has truth on its side. This is why those on the extremes must always distort history, creating fictional versions that support the ever-expanding structure of lies they want us to accept.

And here we encounter another key identifying trait of all extremist ideologies, whether national socialists like Hitler or international socialists like Lenin: their remarkable capacity for spreading lies. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Fidel -- yes, the whole bunch and so many others -- all encouraged telling the lie so long as doing so aided the spread of their ideology. For them the end always justifies the means, any means. 

This might lead you to believe that such extreme ideologues are not unlike most politicians who tell lies so easily when it suits their purposes. Yes, indeed, most politicians lie on occasion, and the longer they've spent in politics, the more comfortable they become with telling the lie. This is why I try to avoid voting for any man or woman who's spent a long career in politics. But communists and other socialists are different from run-of-the-mill politicians. The latter lie occasionally, but the former lie constantly. They must because their failing policies are indefensible.

Communist China's a wonderful case in point. Every agreement, every treaty, every official statement made by the ruling Chinese Communist Party is based on and filled with lies. The lie is present even in the nation's official name: the People's Republic of China. The people have no say in their government which cannot be described, by any definition I'm familiar with, as a republic.

Just look at how the party has handled the virus. When COVID-19 began to spread in Wuhan, the authorities clamped down hard on the doctors who were telling the truth about the budding crisis. Most were arrested because in a socialist state the truth will get you imprisoned. (See this story: Los Angeles Times.)

Now, months later, when the party offers statistics on the spread of the Coronavirus in China, you can be certain the data are intentionally inaccurate. This week we've begun to hear reports of tens of thousands of cremations taking place in Wuhan, where the virus apparently originated, and this despite the "official" death toll of 3,305. (See this story: International Business Times.)

The Communist Party can't completely hide the truth, so it changes the conversation and offers the world a spectacular lie: the United States Army is responsible for introducing the virus into Wuhan Province. 

Interestingly, many politicians and members of the mainstream media accept the Chinese "data" without question and use it to attack their favorite target: the president. In other words, they base their own lies on the lies of those whom they know are lying. Yes, it's all very interesting, and would actually be entertaining were it not so serous and so deadly.

Them Killer Guns

"Civil wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not." -- A. E. Samaan

OK, in the spirit of full transparency, I'm a deacon and I also own a few firearms. Nothing weird about that. I know many other brother deacons who enjoy shooting. As for me, I used to engage in occasional target shooting, but really don't have the time now. So, in truth, I clean my firearms every so often, just to keep them operable, but really haven't used them very much in recent years. And like virtually all legal firearm owners, I obey the laws, even unjust, un-Constitutional laws. This, of course, separates law-abiding owners of firearms from gun-toting criminals who, as you might expect, don't really pay attention to laws. 

A while ago, a parishioner, having heard that I owned some firearms, suggested that, "as a man of God, it's immoral for you to own guns." When I suggested that automobiles, knives, baseball bats, and fists also killed a bunch of people every year, some more than guns, he said, "That's different." When I asked why it was different, he had no answer. "It's just not the same," he said. (By the way, every year knives kill far more people than rifles.)

Of course, it's not different. Cars and knives and firearms are simply tools, and there's certainly nothing immoral about owning any or all of them. Sadly, though, this man was the victim of an intentional misinformation campaign that has apparently achieved some of its hoped-for goals. When Americans were polled recently and asked to guess the leading cause of gun-related deaths, the results were interesting. Check it out:

I'll spell out the results since the captions on the graph are rather small. Their guesses:

• 4% - Don't know
• 25% - Mass Shooting
• 33% - Non-Mass Homicide
• 23% - Suicide
• 14% - Unintentional

As you can see from the above, most Americans seem to believe homicides and mass shootings are the leading causes of gun-related deaths, with suicides and unintentional (presumably accidental) coming in third and fourth. 

Now let's look at the actual data from the Center for Disease Control:

•  0.3% - Mass Shooting
• 36.8% - Non-Mass Homicide
• 60.8% - Suicide
• 0.9% - Undetermined
• 1.2% - Unintentional

The CDC, a government agency, keeps track of all causes of death, and their latest data on gun-related deaths (from 2017)  show how misinformed most folks are. I can only assume their ignorance results from a media and uninformed politicians that feed them grossly inaccurate information on firearms. 

Note that the actual leading cause of gun-related deaths -- over 60% -- is suicide. But more striking is the figure for mass shootings: less than 1% as opposed to the 25% result from the poll. 

To read more on the results of this poll, including a demographic breakdown of those participating, click here: Washington Free Beacon.

I've also embedded the following video of Amy Swearer, a legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. By the way, her statistics are absolutely correct...I checked.

Read what Teddy Roosevelt said over 100 years ago:

"The great body of our citizens shoot less as time goes on. We should encourage rifle practice among schoolboys, and indeed among all classes, as well as in the military services by every means in our power. Thus, and not otherwise, may we be able to assist in preserving peace in the world...The first step -- in the direction of preparation to avert war if possible, and to be fit for war if it should come -- is to teach men to shoot."

Teddy Roosevelt understood that the 2nd Amendment wasn't designed to protect hunters or target shooters, but to protect the people from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Interestiingly, in 1962 I graduated from a Catholic high school in New York's Westchester County. Our school had a rifle team and a indoor rifle range. I suspect that school no longer has either. Perhaps the range has been replaced with a safe room where students can escape from those ever present microaggressions.