Is it too much to ask that the people weighing in on the gun violence debate first familiarize themselves with the subject? Apparently.
When it comes to firearms, the laws that govern them, public sentiment, etc., the national press is basically illiterate. Indeed, reporters and pundits regularly display a level of ignorance rarely seen and certainly never tolerated in any other issue debate. But being generally misinformed doesn’t stop them from sounding off, telling viewers and readers what’s really at stake in the debate.
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Consider, for example, the following passage from an article published Wednesday morning by CNN [emphasis added]:
“Hard to find polling”? Come on, man. Google is your friend.
As it turns out, only 21 percent of Americans say they supported the idea of repealing the Second Amendment, according to a survey conducted last month by the Economist and YouGov. The overwhelming majority of survey respondents (60 percent!) said they oppose the idea. The survey, which was conducted between Feb. 25 and 27 and has a margin of error for registered voters of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points, also found that self-identified Democratic respondents were almost evenly split on the idea of a repeal. Thirty-nine percent said they’d oppose it, while 41 percent said otherwise.
It wasn’t hard to find this data. In fact, we wrote about it here at the Washington Examiner when the survey was first published.
As if the author’s failure even to Google the topic wasn’t bad enough, the article’s whole idea seems to be a distortion rather than any serious search attempt to reveal the truth. For starters, it’s titled “Of course Trump was going to seize on the far-fetched Second Amendment repeal idea,” as if the president had floated the idea of repeal as some sort of distraction. As his tweet and even the CNN article show, the president had simply responded to former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’ New York Times op-ed, which called for – you guessed it – a repeal of the Second Amendment. This is on top of other Times personalities who have called for the same.
And let’s not forget the March For Our Lives demonstration last week in the nation’s capital, wherein one gun control activist after another clearly called for a repeal of the Second Amendment. Others went beyond that, calling for gun confiscation.
Now, compare what these people are actually saying out loud to the general tone of the CNN article. “Of course Trump” was going to “seize” (or should it be “pounce”?) on this bogeyman … that many on the Left seem to be discussing as a serious political goal. Go figure.
Full disclosure: This author is a paid contributor with CNN/HLN.
