No Matter How Much You Hate the Media, You Don’t Hate Them Enough

I’m used to the media getting stuff wrong on guns, gun rights, violent crime, and so on. I’ve seen it time and time again. For a long time, I believed a lot of this was really just honest mistakes born out of ignorance. They weren’t gun people and no one in the newsroom were gun people. They likely didn’t know any gun people or, if they did, they weren’t aware those folks were into guns.

But those days are long behind me.

All too often these days, I see issues reported on and framed in the most disingenuous ways imaginable. They try to make headlines and the body of the story, at least in the initial paragraphs, as alarming as possible to the news consumer, all in an effort to manipulate public perception.

Take this story out of Arizona. A House committee in the legislature voted to approve a measure that would allow teachers to potentially carry firearms on campus if they so desire.

But that’s not how it’s presented, at least at first.

Let’s start with the headline, which is all some people will ever see. “Arizona House panel plans to reduce school gun violence by allowing more guns on campus.”

This was likely written by someone who thinks guns cause violence in some way. To such a person, the idea of allowing teachers–the people many of these some folks seem to want to hold up as demigods everywhere else–is insane because guns make people evil or something.

The article itself, however, doesn’t start out much better.

A gun may be on the supply list for school staff and teachers next year if new legislation is signed into law in Arizona.

Oh, that’s clever.

Except, it’s not. Why? Because if something is on the supply list, that means it’s a requirement. The rest of the story doesn’t support that at all.

House Bill 2022 is one of the first pieces of legislation to make progress in Arizona’s new legislature, passing out of the House Education Committee on Tuesday, the second day of session. It would allow teachers and staff at Arizona’s schools to carry on campus and in classrooms in a move that supporters say would be an investment in students’ safety during a time when school shootings continue to threaten the nation’s children.

“We’re not advocating to go out and find the active shooter, we’re advocating for them to protect their children in the best manner possible,” state Rep. Selina Bliss, R-LD 1, said. “And this is the very last step if they were pushed to that situation.”

Bliss, who has a background as a nursing educator, sponsored the bill, but says it was written by the Arizona Citizen’s Defense League, a nonprofit gun rights group.

Funny how they never point out when Everytown or some other anti-gun group actually writes the gun control legislation being pushed, isn’t it?

Now, in fairness to the reporter, this admission and information that it’s optional comes right after the implication that teachers might be required to carry a firearm. It also goes on to note that teachers will have to undergo extensive firearm training before they can carry in the classroom.

Still, the framing is far too typical from the media, which leans into the idea that guns are the problem.

This comes from the media all the time and it infects the brains of ordinary Americans. 

What’s more, no one in the media hierarchy ever thinks to call this out. They don’t call it out because they favor it.