The Media Research Center has a long, sad history of deflecting attention away from gun massacres so it and its fellow right-wingers never have to deal with difficult questions of how guns should be regulated. When a 14-year-old student used an AR-style rifle to kill four of his fellow students at a Georgia school, the MRC once again went into pro-gun defense mode. Curtis Houck whined that others called for action in the wake of the shooting in a Sept. 5 post:
On Thursday’s CBS Mornings, co-host and Kamala Harris donor Gayle King reacted to Wednesday’s deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia by continuing her decade-plus crusade for mass gun control, arguing this time the deaths of two students and two teachers was proof Americans believe “it’s okay to kill kids” since nothing’s been “done to stop” school shootings.
King began the show by quibbling with the local sheriff’s declaration that “hate will not prevail” by insisting there’s “a lot of hate, it seems, in this country” as evidenced by “another American community reeling from deadly gun violence.”
“I just keep thinking, we all think this, how many more stories do we have to report like this? I don’t want us ever to become desensitized to it. I thought Vice President Harris said it right, it doesn’t have to be this way,” King later said after having heard from a student who lost his algebra teacher.
[…]She then leveled her despicable charge: “It is very difficult for me right now. It’s hard for me to accept the fact that we live in a country where I guess we think it’s okay to kill children, because if we didn’t think it was okay, something would be done to stop it, and it doesn’t seem to matter who’s in office[.]”
Co-host Nate Burleson agreed by saying “[s]omething would have been done a long time ago.” How or what that would thwart shootings was not provided.
Co-host Tony Dokoupil gave his two cents that one would have hoped the country had long been able to have “find a compromise that enshrines the Second Amendment, but keeps our children safe.”
Houck notably offered no solutions of his own; instead, he lashed out at King because “A search of the NewsBusters archives revealed over a dozen examples of King calling for some form of gun control or casting vile aspersions on the American people.”
Jorge Bonilla whined in a Sept. 6 post that someone issued a call to action:
The CBS Evening News closed out their newscast with a commentary piece on the most recent school shooting in Winder, Georgia. The editorial was high on emotion, but offered little in the way of solutions beyond calls to “do something”.
[…]This, too, has become a part of the post-school shooting ritual. The national media come parachute into a city, perform their emotive journalism, advocate for gun control, and then fly back to New York or D.C. without ever addressing the true causes of what led to each individual school shooting.
In their view, the problem is always the guns. It is never the litany of breakdowns which always float to the surface in the immediate aftermath of the shooting- most notoriously, “known to authorities” which has become a meme.
But then there are the other breakdowns that go unaddressed, whether these are societal or familial. The media don’t really care about these. They just come in and cry out for gun control. At least they do in most cases.
CBS didn’t even do that, choosing instead to clamor for a fix it is unable or unwilling to mention by name. And so Norah O’Donnell closes out the newscast with the familiar “do something” call to action.
Even if that “something”, civilian disarmament, would ultimately put the whole of our society at risk.
Bonilla complained some more in a Sept. 8 post with a headline calling the idea of gun buybacks “GHOULISH” even though arguably the more ghoulish thing is to do nothing in the face of school gun massacres:
It is often the case that tragedy brings out the worst in the Regime Media, some of whom see a school shooting as an opportunity to advocate for restrictive gun controls.
Watch as NBC’s Kristen Welker advocates for the mandatory gun buybacks proposed by then-Senator Kamala Harris in 2019, during her interview with Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock on Meet the Press:
[…]No serious Regime Media coverage of a school shooting ever delves into the many failures that happen before a 14-year-old opens fire, as was the case at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. Not the familial dynamics, not the allegations of bullying, or the trans-adjacent Discord chat frequented by the shooter.
Nor is there, in this case, any discussion of the law enforcement failures at play here. There is only the left’s disarmament fetish, both as a matter of principle and of policy.
Yet Bonilla offered no solutions of his own, even though restricting gun ownership would arguably be a very effective way to solve the problem. Nor did he explain how the shooter’s access to a “trans-adjacent Discord chat” played any possible role.
After vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made a questionable statement regarding the shooting, the MRC’s defense level increased. Curtis Houck ranted in a Sept. 6 post that Vance’s words were called out and insisted they were taken out of context:
Hours after the Associated Press fired off a since-deleted viral tweet falsely claiming 2024 GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance shrugged off school shootings like Wednesday’s in Georgia as “a fact of life,” Friday’s CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today joined in this a blatant case of election interference by touting the “backlash” to Vance’s comment…which was actually about the need to fortify schools.
Of course, none brought up the AP tweet or the real firestorm it caused Thursday night on X.
“Trading shots, the Georgia school shooting now a hot topic on the campaign trail after these comments by President Trump’s running mate JD Vance,” said Today co-host Savannah Guthrie in a tease.
Guthrie and NBC promptly did the Harris-Walz team’s bidding with this out-of-context soundbite of Vance: “I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life.”
Brad Wilmouth devoted a Sept. 15 post to defending Vance:
After Senator Vance spoke out on the issue, describing it as a “fact of life” that some psychopaths target schools, making it necessary for lawmakers to make schools more secure, some CNN and MSNBC hosts picked up on Democrat distortions of his comments and promoted them. MSNBC’s Joy Reid snarled: “…the Republican response to the tragic shooting in Georgia has been generally horrific, but of course J.D. Vance again takes the cake because of course he’s J.D. Vance.”
She soon added: “Vance’s cold, matter of fact and honestly heartless response is reminiscent of Donald Trump’s reaction to a school shooting in Perry, Iowa, … 36 hours after it happened.”
Without the context that Trump was telling supporters they needed to get past a school shooting that happened in Iowa in January so they could focus on the upcoming Iowa caucuses, Reid showed a clip of Trump talking to supporters after the Perry, Iowa shooting. Trump: “It’s a very terrible thing that happened, and it’s just terrible to see that happening, and that’s just horrible. So surprising to see and hear. But we have to get over it — we have to move forward. We have to move forward.”
Frequent guest Basil Smikle angrily responded: “Gun violence has been present in my life for almost all my life. I lost many of my friends growing up to gun culture. So screw you if you think this is a fact of life that I should just get over tomorrow.”
He soon added: “But Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are saying, ‘Hey, you know what, just get over it.’ Well, screw you in that mindset. We are drunk off of guns in this country.”
It’s unclear why Wilmouth thinks adding context to the words of Vance and Trump makes them any more palatable.