by Lee Williams

Print journalism is pretty simple, really. At least it used to be. For decades there were basically two types of stories, news and opinion. Reporters wrote news stories. Columnists and a few others wrote opinion pieces. 

But in recent years we’ve seen another type of journalism rise in prominence, the anti-gun story, which masquerades as a regular news piece but is chock-full of opinion and false claims. When reporters fill their anti-gun stories with their opinions their editors do nothing, because they often share their staffer’s opinions. 

During my 20 years as a newspaperman, I would call out the authors of anti-gun stories whenever I saw them, but my criticisms were usually never addressed, even though we have a constitutional right to keep and bear arms.  

Nowadays, journalists talk constantly about the accuracy of their reporting. However, when they write anti-gun stories, the normal journalism standards are gone, and the editing is a complete joke. The size of the newspaper also makes a difference. Smaller newspapers are generally more accurate when writing about guns than the big ones. 

Case in point: The New York Times. 

On Monday, the Times published what is perhaps the most anti-gun news story seen in quite a while. It was written by reporter Glenn Thrush, who started at the newspaper in 2017 and claimed in his bio that his most “fulfilling assignment” was writing obituaries, which is odd. Writing about the recently departed is far from fulfilling. 

Thrush’s story was titled “Trump Administration to Roll Back Array of Gun Control Measures.” The array was described as a reversal of the strict gun control rules Joe Biden ordered “to stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles.” 

If you look closely at Thrush’s story, you will find factual errors and anti-gun hyperbole in nearly every paragraph. For example, Thrush wrote that gun dealers stripped of the Federal Firearm Licenses by Biden’s crazy zero-tolerance policy were “found to have repeatedly violated federal laws and regulations.” 

This is far from the truth. 

Biden’s insane policy stripped hundreds of gun dealers of their FFL’s solely because of extremely minor clerical errors. It is estimated to have increased the FFL revocation rate by 700 percent. Thrush never mentioned that, or that the ATF occasionally sent its poorly trained SWAT team to the gun dealers’ homes, or that the dealers were handcuffed and laying on their stomachs during their conversations with the ATF. In one case, the alleged suspect never got the chance to respond to any of the federal allegations, because ATF’s SWAT team shot and killed him in his own home before they had a chance to talk. 

Thrush was not kind to Attorney General Pam Bondi or her plan to use the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to determine whether it is “engaging in a pattern or practice of depriving ordinary, law-abiding Californians of their Second Amendment rights.”

Even though this task is clearly covered by federal law, Thrush claimed that Bondi was “repurposing an investigative unit that had been used to expose racial discrimination and police violence by local enforcement agencies.” 

Bondi’s decision didn’t involve any repurposing. The federal laws that govern the Civil Rights Division are very clear, unlike Biden’s ATF rules. 

The author spoke to the executive director of Giffords, who falsely claimed Trump gave his seal of approval to “reckless dealers who are willing to sell guns to traffickers and criminals.” Over the years I have met more than a few gun dealers, but no one willing to sell arms to anyone with a criminal record. That this actually made it into a New York Times story is incredibly damning.

Thrush also claimed that the ATF took “an abrupt U-turn” from the schemes of Biden and ATF’s former director to “stem the flood of unregulated semiautomatic handguns and rifles that have contributed to mass shootings and exacerbated the violent crime wave that peaked after the coronavirus pandemic.”

A flood of unregulated handguns and rifles? 

Remember that the next time you fill out an ATF Form 4473. 

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