On Monday, tens of thousands of people descended on the state Capitol in Richmond, Virginia, to exercise the First Amendment in defense of their Second Amendment rights. But if all you’d done was follow liberal media reports and take cues from Democratic politicians, you would have expected this political protest, launched in response to Virginia Democrats’ anti-gun legislative agenda, to end in violence and be made up of extremists.
Examples of hysterical media fearmongering abound.
News outlet Axios billed the protest as possibly “another Charlottesville.” As my colleague Timothy P. Carney noted, one NBC reporter called it a “white nationalist rally.” Even the Washington Post’s post-event headline was ridiculously inflammatory: “Weapons, flags but no violence: Massive pro-gun rally in Virginia capital.”
CNN sounds disappointed pic.twitter.com/OWpsCCYR0q
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 20, 2020
The bias shows liberals in the media took cues from Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, who set off the alarmism by declaring a state of emergency in anticipation of the peaceful rally. He had cited vagaries about “credible threats” but provided no evidence. The gambit was pretty clear: portray Democrats as the sensible folks just trying to pass commonsense gun laws and the Second Amendment supporters rallying against them as radical, dangerous extremists.
This was always baseless. Gun owners tend to be, if anything, statistically more law-abiding than non-gun owners. For example, concealed carry permit holders are one of the most law-abiding groups on average.
The hysteria completely backfired. The event went on without violence, with even the left-leaning Washington Post, whose own coverage had been alarmist, admitting that it “never erupt[ed] into the violence authorities had feared,” and that the “police reported no major incidents.”
Again, as Carney noted, this whole debacle reminds us that many members of the liberal media hate, or at the very least fail to understand, gun owners.
This all amounts to a massive liberal own-goal. Anti-gun leftists in Virginia and in the liberal media warned that the pro-Second Amendment protest would be dangerous and violent. Reality reminded us once again that law-abiding gun owners are not the problem.
