CNN is on the warpath against politicians and gun rights activist organizations for defending the Second Amendment against efforts to erode the right to keep and bear arms, especially when remarks from Joe Biden are singled out.
In a lengthy report Friday, CNN focused on West Virginia Republican State Rep. Brandon Steele, who has been pushing a “Second Amendment Preservation Act” that would “bar state or local police from enforcing new federal gun restrictions the Biden administration might adopt.”
While the story notes Steele has acknowledged the Biden administration has been so far unsuccessful in pressing what was a sweeping gun control agenda unveiled early in 2020. It is an extremist package that includes a ban on so-called “assault rifles,” waiting periods on handgun purchases, so-called “universal background checks” and regulate semi-auto rifles the same as full-auto machine guns.
The story asserts gun rights groups and politicians have been “gunning up fears that Biden wants to… ‘erase the Second Amendment’ and come to people’s homes and take away their guns.”
CNN recalls a Fox News piece that talked about how Second Amendment groups hit the airwaves with a message that if Biden “can force a needle in your arm, he can take away your gun.” That message was sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation, an organization often overlooked by the establishment media, which is content with demonizing the National Rifle Association. NRA had nothing to do with the message.
CNN declared in its report, “The inflammatory rhetoric surrounding these new laws, critics says, is similar and even connected to claims of 2020 election fraud and pushback against Covid-19 vaccine or mask mandates in that they rely on a denial of reality.”
Perhaps it is CNN that is denying reality. The SAF messages broadcast earlier this fall included quotes from Biden during a CNN Townhall in which he admitted he has been working to prohibit not only semi-auto rifles, but 9mm pistols.
At the time the message ran on some 20 different cable networks, Alan Gottlieb, SAF founder and executive vice president, said in a statement, “Over the past eight months since taking office, Joe Biden has evolved from being an annoying gun control advocate to a dangerously ambitious gun prohibitionist. He hasn’t simply climbed on the gun ban train, he’s now the engineer, portraying so-called ‘gun violence’ as a public health epidemic. He’s perpetuating a myth invented by the gun ban lobby to demonize guns, their owners and the Second Amendment that protects their right to keep and bear arms.”
The CNN story quotes Alexandra Filindra, described as “a political science professor at University of Illinois, Chicago, who studies gun politics, disinformation and social media.” She intimates gun rights defenders as being “part of an ideological system, [and believe] that the other side — in this case, the Democrats — are devious and intent on taking political rights away and imposing a socialistic tyranny.”
The Second Amendment does not protect a “political right.” It protects a fundamental right enumerated in the Constitution, gun rights advocates would respond.
But after Tuesday’s devastating election results for Democrats, whose only bright light seems to be the victory of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy while a Republican truck driver operating on a shoestring budget just beat the leader of the state Senate Democrats, probably will put gun control on the back burner, if not the shelf. Virginia voters replaced Democrats with Republicans in all three statewide races including the governor’s race. In Minneapolis, voters soundly rejected an effort to defund and dismantle the police department. In Seattle, voters rejected candidates who had advocated to defund the police.
It just might be a forecast of things to come next November at the mid-term elections. The rush toward the far left by radical anti-gun Democrats just hit a speed bump, and people behind the efforts to protect the Second Amendment were partly, if not largely responsible.
