Thread: Diane Sawyer's Sensationalist Crap

So anyone who was spent any time watching ABC this past week may have noticed the ads they've been running for a 20/20 special hosted by Diane Sawyer and called "If Only I Had A Gun", which aired at 10 tonight. A few friends and I decided to watch it since we were sitting around bullshitting with not much to do. Well, it turned out to be a bunch of irresponsible fear-mongering and BS (surprise!)

The program got off to a rocky start when it had Diane Sawyer say that there are "over 250 million rifles, pistols, and assault weapons" in the United States. Oof. I guess "assault weapons" comprise their own class of firearms, distinct from categories such as "rifle" or "pistol". Obviously she said "rifles, pistols, and assault weapons" because it sounds scarier than "rifles and pistols". Which should surprise no-one, since as we all know, the very purpose of the term "assault weapon" is to sound scary rather than to actually mean anything. Of course the reality of the situation is that all so-called "assault weapons" are actually either rifles or pistols; they are rifles or pistols that happen to fit a certain set of criteria dreamed up by gun control advocates to separate firearms into meaningless categories for the purpose of getting them banned. Anyhow, on to the meat of the program:

The first segment of the program addressed the question of how easy or difficult it is for a regular person to defend themselves with a handgun. Okay, a fair enough question. Unfortunately, their "investigation" of this issue consisted solely of this experiment: They went onto a college campus, picked a half-dozen ditzy college students with no firearms experience (but they did take pains to point out that one of the kids "liked action movies" and was an airsofter!), let them run through a few mags of Simunition at the police range, and then had them try to defend themselves in a simulated school shooting situation. I might also add that they had them all wearing long, baggy, untucked white t-shirts that they predictably got tangled up in when they tried to draw. It should also be mentioned that their opponent in this simulated scenario was a police officer with police weapons and tactics training. Unsurprisingly, none of the college students did very well. This was the ONLY treatment that the program gave to the question of whether self-defense with a firearm is a practical proposition for the ordinary person, and then they concluded with a sort of "Well, there you have it" attitude as if they had seriously addressed the issue and reached a meaningful conclusion. No mention of the fact that their scenario is not representative of the most common sort of self-defense situations; no mention of the fact that most CCP holders aren't giggling college sophomores with essentially zero firearms experience/practice (and essentially zero serious-mindedness about the prospect of self defense), and no mention of the fact that ~2,000,000 Americans do somehow manage to defend themselves with a firearm every year, and that the use of guns to defend against a criminal is therefore roughly fifteen times more common that the use of guns to commit a crime.

The next segment of the program focused on a low-income, crime-ridden, predominantly African-American community where the people are afraid to go out at night because of the street gangs. It discussed the weapons that the gangsters have, and had some really heart-wrenching moments with young children talking about the people they knew who had been shot. The implication that guns are to blame for this community's problems was obvious. No mention was made of the complex set of interconnected social, cultural, economic, and educational problems that actually create crime-ridden communities such as the one featured. If you were paying attention, you would have been able to surmise from the statements of one of the gangsters that all the guns were obtained through entirely illegal channels (obviously these guys aren't going to be showing two forms of ID and filling out a form 4473 when they pick up their next murder weapon), but the voiceover never acknowledged this fact. Nor did it divulge that because of this fact, in conjunction with the number of guns already in criminal circulation, the gangsters' ability to purchase weapons would be totally unaffected by even the most all-inclusive gun ban.

The next segment of the program focused on the problem of kids finding guns. It was basically a series of scenes showing how young children tend to play with guns if they find them in their house, and showing that kids are often able to find unsecured guns in the household even if the parents think the guns are well-hidden, and showing that even teenagers often display dangerous recklessness when handling guns that they find (especially if peer pressure is involved). Throughout the entire segment, no mention--not even the slightest or most indirect mention--of secure storage was ever made. "Gun safe", "gun locker", "secured", "locked up"... None of these phrases or words was used even once. It was honestly baffling. I would have been perfectly okay with it if they ended the segment with something like "And this is why it's important to keep your gun locked up securely if you do have one in the house", but there was nothing like that... just endless montages of toddlers peering innocently down the barrels of revolvers, calculated to be terrifying to any parent and create a mental link between "gun in the house" and "danger to your kids!". It also talked about an incident at a machine gun shoot where an 8-year-old boy lost control of an Uzi and managed to shoot himself in the head. Obviously tragic.... but if you let your 8-year-old kid drive a motorcycle and he crashes it, it's your fault for being a shitty parent, not the motorcycle's fault. I don't really see how fully automatic weapons are different. This father let his son handle a piece of potentially dangerous machinery that the kid was obviously not physically capable of controlling, and that should have only been handled by a capable adult. What does the tragic result have to do with the broader issue of gun control, gun rights, or the usefulness of guns (which is what this program was supposedly examining)? But, they brought it up anyhow, to add a bit more fuel to the fire I guess.

The last segment of the program focused on the "gun show loophole". Hoo boy. It centered around a young man whose sister was killed in the VT massacre, and who had made it his personal crusade to spread awareness of the "gun show loophole" by going around to gun shows and seeing how many guns he could buy without being subjected to a background check. He proceeded to go to a Virginia gun show and walk out with a number of firearms that he had bought from non-FFL sellers. Unfortunately, the program utterly neglected to explain that he was able to buy these firearms not because there's some "gun show loophole" that voids background check requirements at gun shows, but because non-FFL sellers NEVER have to conduct background checks, whether or not they sell at gun shows. The guy could just as easily have bought those guns, without a background check, if his neighbor or friend was getting rid of them and offered to sell them to him. Or if he had followed up a "for sale" ad posted at his local range. The program reinforced the deceptive effect of this omission by showing clips of anti-gun protesters yelling about how gun shows are places where background checks aren't required. The ultimate effect was to create, for the viewers, the completely false impression that you ordinarily have to get a background check to buy a gun, UNLESS you go to a gun show, in which case all bets are off and you can just had over cash and walk out with the gun. I also had to wonder whether this guy realized that closure of the "gun show loophole" wouldn't have prevented the VT massacre and wouldn't have saved his sister's life, because the VT shooter bought his guns at an FFL gun store and passed background checks in order to do so. He even had to abide by the 1-month waiting period that VA law requires between handgun purchases. The reason the VT shooter was able to buy guns wasn't that he could somehow evade background checks by going to a gun show, it was that insufficient mental health reporting procedures allowed his history of mental illness to be kept out of the database that it should have been in. Gun shows and non-FFL background check requirements really have absolutely nothing to do with the VT massacre, but Diane Sawyer spent 10 minutes of her show creating the utterly false impression that closing the "gun show loophole" would have prevented that massacre.

I wouldn't generally describe myself as a conservative, and I have to roll my eyes when people of any political affiliation complain about the media is biased in favor of the opposite political affiliation, but damn... this really made the phrase "liberal media bias" sound reasonable. In conclusion, Diane Sawyer is a lying bitch who shamelessly distorts the facts in order to make effective self-defense seem infeasible, to blame violent crime on the tools used by the criminals, to make people terrified to keep a gun in their home, and to demonize gun shows and blame them for tragic crimes that they had nothing to do with.

/rant, I just had to get it out of my system.