Korwin: Media Needs A Reminder That Guns Save Lives

Although ethical journalism demands covering both sides of a story, when it comes to guns and the Constitution, today’s journalists abandon the rules and only cover the side they like—paradoxically, the part they hate. The dark side. They hate guns, gun owners, gun rights and it shows. It’s not good to hate.

Reporters wear their hatred on their sleeves and on page one. This contributes to their near-total loss of credibility, with matching losses of readership and revenue. But there’s hope, hatred and bias can be fixed. But there’s little hope, because journalists don’t want help—they like festering in their detestable immoral stew. Too many don’t even realize they’re there.

While cable “news” programs on both sides of the aisle perpetuate a single gun-savage story day after day, show after show, loop after endless loop, ignoring practically every other significant story in the world, there is in fact other news. The PBS News Hour, to its credit, runs diverse stories, proving there is more to life than death.

Every scholarly study on the subject demonstrates that guns save lives and stop crime. This is why we the people have guns, and provide guns to; the police, the military, covert and overt federal agencies, and foreign allies.

Safety is why our brilliant Founders of the United States ensconced the right to arms into our charter, generating the most opulent, abundant, freedom-oriented nation the world has ever seen. The balance of power created by an armed populace is the ultimate purpose of the Second Amendment, and it has worked. This core fact is omitted from nearly every recent discussion of the subject. Balance of power is what’s at stake when left-wing radicals in Congress and elsewhere scream to ban guns in public hands. They never even remotely suggest taking machineguns—or any guns—away from massively armed “trustworthy” agents of government all around us. The anti-gun radicals are clueless.

Fellow “official” Americans, the ones who tap your communications, confiscate property without cause, compromise our justice system, create unmitigated havoc in our courts, police the streets sometimes during riots, operate in inner cities, they won’t imagine disarming. These people have built up arsenals beyond imagination, and nobody bats an eye.

But let any human outside government own anything beyond a pop gun, and on the occasion of a maniac going berserk, useful leftist idiots all around start foaming and demanding an end to the power balance—unilateral public disarmament. How massively ignorant the left-wing-managed culture has become. Worse, just look how broadly their Marxist central-control mindset has spread.

Guns have social utility. Did you know that? Have you heard that anywhere in the great gun debate? All you hear is, “Why does anyone need that gun?” Or why does anyone need any gun, as if property ownership depends on need, with someone determining need for you. This defines it right there—journalists today have been inculcated with a socialist framework—to each according to need.

The journalism requirement for a balanced debate seems over. J-schools are fine with that development. They detest balance as much as the public that their graduates have hoodwinked. Lack of diversity in left-wing university thought has metastasized.

Every scholarly study on DGUs—Defensive Gun Uses—has found massive numbers of crimes prevented and lives saved by privately held firearms. Self-defense stories are actively and deliberately suppressed by so-called “news” people—they confess this to me privately. “It could encourage others,” I’m told. “Editors won’t allow it.”

If reporters, editors and producers did not censor gun news, an informed public would scream bloody murder at the distortion portrayed nightly on the “news.” You, your friends and relatives would have the whole picture, and your worldview would be unrecognizable from what it is today. You would value guns in public hands, instead of falling into lockstep behind tyrants in Congress pressing to disarm you.

When former president Bill Clinton had his Justice Dept. conduct a study, hoping to disprove the truth, the numbers were so positive they had the study quashed. It showed 3.4 million DGUs a year. That’s 9,315 lives saved and crimes avoided every day, by gun owners. Studies show the guns are almost never fired, they’re just referred to or presented. In the most commonly cited study, Gary Kleck’s work out of Florida State found roughly 2.5 million per year, or 6,849 DGUs daily. Even the tiniest result, the National Crime Victimization Survey, using questionable methods, showed 65,000 DGUs, or 178 daily, more than three times in every state every day on average. If it saves just one life…

Nancy Pelosi, Charles Schumer, Michael Bloomberg and the other tyrannical anti-rights bigots don’t want you to know this. They just want you thinking the NRA civil-rights gun-safety-training team is some evil bogyman you should hate. The bigots ply you with emotional fodder, so you’ll hate and support bigotry, without thought. Because if you think, and have facts, you’ll see those politicians for the hate-filled manipulative despots they are.

There’s a reason this is the greatest nation on the face of the Earth. A freely armed public is a big part of it. A disarmed subservient public is what megalomaniac politicians and their sycophants seek, worldwide.

Now you know. Guns save lives. Guns stop crime. Guns are good. Guns are why America is still free. The “news” media left out that part. Don’t give up an inch.

Alan Korwin, a national columnist, award-winning author of 14 books and veteran of more than 1,000 radio and TV interviews, has been writing as a journalism ombudsman since 2006. He can be reached at GunLaws.com.