BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today criticized the dominant media for its continued subliminal campaign to blame firearms for the carnage in Chicago, repeatedly using the term “gun violence” to describe the slaughter that local authorities appear unable to curb.
“It’s not ‘gun violence’,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb, “it’s gang violence, and the sad thing is that reporters and editors know it. But they simply refuse to acknowledge that if you don’t call the problem by its right name, you can’t solve it.
“This amounts to ‘fake news’ to advance an anti-rights political agenda,” he added.
Gottlieb said a cursory glance at today’s continuing coverage of Chicago’s mayhem and murder found that USA Today, for example, called the current situation “an ugly spasm of gun violence” while acknowledging in the next paragraph that the weekend murders of three children happened because they “were caught in gang-related gunfire.” He said that the guns “didn’t pull their own triggers.”
A Chicago Tribune reporter has issued a “humble plea” to Barack and Michelle Obama to “come home and fight the gun violence that plagues Chicago.” The reporter also acknowledged that the latest killings of children had “likely ties to gang conflicts.”
NBC News reported that anti-gun Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel had met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Monday “to discuss federal help to fight gun violence.”
“This is head-in-the-sand political correctness run amok,” Gottlieb declared. “The press is living in denial. Their reluctance to admit that the problem is gangs is at best irresponsible. The press appears loathe to blame decades of bad public policy for the current situation. By sublimely perpetuating the impression that guns, rather than gangs and their mindless hatred are responsible for the savagery that now plagues some Chicago neighborhoods, the dominant media has become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.”