Gun Laws & Legislation

Joe Manchin: Media will ‘put up pictures of dead children’ to sway gun-control votes

David Martosko Executive Editor
Font Size:

West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin fears a full-court-press from the media on gun control, according to the leader of a gun-rights group who met with him Tuesday afternoon in his Charleston, W.Va. office.

Writing on Facebook, West Virginia Citizens Defense League president Keith Morgan described Manchin’s reaction when he contended that Congress would not renew a federal-level “assault weapons ban” or create new limits on the capacity of ammunition magazines. (RELATED: Top Democrat says outright assault weapons ban will not pass)

“Senator Manchin told me,” Morgan wrote, “what the media will do if Congress (including the US House of Representatives) fails to pass an AWB and/or mag restrictions.”

“‘They will one, by one, put up pictures of dead children. They will show the carnage,'” he recalled Manchin warning.

“Considering that tomorrow, President Obama will be exploiting children by dragging them on stage with him while he outlays his plan, this is not a huge leap,” Morgan added. “And these are the words of a United States senator. … That is a direct quote. Verbatim.” (RELATED: Obama to showcase gun-control campaign Wednesday)

Manchin, the former governor, won his Senate seat partially on the strength of a television ad in which he fired a rifle bullet through a copy of the “cap and trade” environmental legislation, a bill that was wildly unpopular in coal-rich West Virginia.

“As your Senator,” he said in the ad, “I’ll protect our Second Amendment rights. That’s why the NRA endorsed me.”

But today, Morgan wrote, Manchin, “supports magazine capacity limits, and possibly other restrictions.”

Watch:

Manchin’s press office did not respond to two emailed requests for comment.

Reached for comment Wednesday morning, Morgan told The Daily Caller that he is “absolutely confident about the accuracy” of his written account, including the direct quote he attributed to Manchin.

“It was a long meeting,” he said. “It ran for roughly an hour.”

Morgan’s organization is planning a rally Saturday in Martinsburg, W.Va. to coincide with a national “Gun Appreciation Day” organized by the Second Amendment Foundation and other groups.

But the West Virginia Citizens Defense League’s Facebook page describes its event as a “Manchin Protest.”

Morgan wrote Tuesday that the senator “stated to me directly, that he believes 75% of West Virginians, like him, believe that the only purposes behind gun ownership and the second amendment are hunting and recreational shooting. He told me that [self-]defense is not an angle he considers or believes in.”

Morgan wrote that he gave Manchin a warning of his own: His organization would hold protests “at every single event” during his re-election campaign in 2018. “We would be at every fund-raiser. We would be there, and the content of our signs would not be pleasant,” he warned.

But Manchin, he said, replied cryptically that “there won’t be any events.”

“A U.S. Senator at his age doesn’t simply quit politics,” Morgan told TheDC in an email. “It is my belief that he’s been offered some sort of appointment” by the Obama administration.

Follow David on Twitter

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel