Media Betrays Its Anti-Gun Bias While Reporting Knife Attacks

The media gave up on pretending to be unbiased a while back, but it still irks me that they expect us to buy into the idea that they are. One of the prime examples of just how much bias they have involves the gun debate. They routinely turn to groups like Everytown, Giffords, and Brady to consult “experts” who wouldn’t know how to load a firearm, much less use one, for a definitive take on guns.

Through the course of looking at stories every day, I see and read a lot of stories about shootings. In a nation of 330 million or so people, there are going to be a lot of them. I won’t pretend I read about everything, but I see a lot.

What I don’t generally look at are knife attacks unless something is startling about them, such as a large number of victims.

But it seems the folks at the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms did.

They looked at several, and in a press release, Chairman Alan Gottlieb shared what they found.

The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is pointing to media hypocrisy in its reporting of at least ten attacks involving knives or hatchets, most of them fatal, yet there was not a single mention of “knife violence,” indicating an appalling double-standard in how violent crime involving firearms is routinely portrayed, whether by broadcast or print media.

“We checked ten different reports Tuesday morning regarding fatal and non-fatal knife attacks, all over the country,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “and not a single report included the term ‘knife violence’ anywhere in the text. Yet pick up any newspaper, read any online report involving the criminal use of a firearm, and by the time you’re finished, you will have seen at least one reference to ‘gun violence.’ I can only conclude the media has a deplorable double-standard when it comes to reporting homicides involving guns, yet the victims are just as injured or dead.

“Underscoring this nonsense,” he said, “is the way the media is reporting the Department of Health and Human Services’ removal of a former surgeon general’s warning that ‘gun violence’ is a public health hazard. Gun ownership is not a communicable disease. Putting that warning on the HHS website was just one more effort by the Biden administration to demonize firearms and the people who own them.

…

“In each of the stabbing reports we studied,” he observed, “suspects were identified and nobody remotely suggested the knife or hatchet involved was somehow responsible. Yet, criminal attacks, suicides, and mishaps involving firearms all routinely fall within the loose definition of so-called ‘gun violence.’ It’s ridiculous.

“While everyone seems so eager to restrict gun ownership,” Gottlieb noted, “literally anyone can buy a knife, no questions asked. What’s important is that neither guns or knives are the problem. It’s the people who misuse them. The antidote to crime is to punish the criminals, not penalize law-abiding citizens who have harmed nobody.”

Gottlieb also notes that the term “gun violence” was made up by the gun lobby and embraced by the media in order to push an anti-gun agenda.

Now, I haven’t looked at things quite as systematically as the CCRKBA did here, but this kind of meshes with what I’ve seen myself overall. There’s no push to blame Kershaw or Gerber for knife attacks. There’s no desire to sue Estwing when a hammer is used. Louisville Slugger has never been held responsible for a crime, either.

No one blames the weapon unless it’s a firearm.

Let’s understand that the American non-gun homicide rate is higher than many developed nations’ total homicide rate. If the fact that our “gun homicide” rate is so much higher is because of our gun laws, or lack thereof, then why is it just a one-way street?

Make no mistake. In time, I think the anti-gun advocates would be thrilled to become anti-knife advocates. They just want to get rid of the guns first. Then they’ll use the same tactics on knives, hammers, and the like. 

For now, though, they’re tipping their hand. The media is exposing its insane bias for the world to see if they only bother to look.

Of course, no one who read Bearing Arms is remotely surprised by this, I’m sure. We’ve seen it aplenty.