I sometimes imagine a scenario in which, through some hilarious misunderstanding when I was just starting out in journalism, I am offered a job in a mainstream newsroom. And indeed, after college, I did spend a few years working as a reporter for newspapers—in rural Wyoming and Colorado. I can almost hear myself asking, “Excuse me, Mr. Editor, but all of those legally armed citizens basically aren’t committing crimes. Just look at the crime data. So, shouldn’t we question the gun-control laws that simply target the law-abiding?”
The editor might have dialed human resources from under his desk.
As for America’s 1st Freedom, if I couldn’t tell the truth here, I would move on. But then, if I didn’t tell the truth, the NRA would move me on. That is how it is here.
This is an important distinction. The NRA stands for the pursuit of the truth in an age when the word “truth” has been twisted incomprehensibly with the placement of the word “my” in front of “truth.” Similarly, the phrase “living Constitution” has been used by those who don’t want the 27 words in the Second Amendment to have literal meaning.
And this goes beyond newsrooms.
For example, William English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, has been subpoenaed, attacked in The New York Times and accused of all sorts of breaches of professional conduct because he had the temerity to administer a huge survey on defensive gun use that was honest.
They are persecuting English in order to, as he put it in The Wall Street Journal, “warn off other academics thinking of doing similar research, and to influence courts where states are losing on the merits.”
English supervised the 2021 National Firearms Survey. Data from this survey of 54,000 American adults estimated that citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; indeed, the survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired.”
To gun-control activists in politics and the media, this finding had to be marginalized. They don’t want people to know that law-abiding Americans need their freedom.
English said that the “attorneys general of Illinois and Washington started issuing subpoenas” for his “documents and communications.” Meanwhile, members of the media contacted him “armed with politicized talking points identical to those used by the state attorneys general in their subpoenas.”
The media, however, could not find any actual problems with the research. English’s survey questions had been peer reviewed. He used a professional survey firm that is also “used by researchers at such institutions as Stanford, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
“My survey results are hard to refute because they line up with other independent surveys from Pew and Gallup at the national level,” said English.
So, why aren’t these members of the mainstream media just ignoring English?
“The Times and other outlets are signaling that they will cancel academics who state inconvenient facts,” wrote English. “Progressive law clerks and state lawyers are violating longstanding norms and laws in service to political agendas. Many journalists carry water for these causes … .”
In the end, English says that if “these reporters want to uncover a well-funded, ideologically motivated plot to undermine objective firearms research, they need only look in the mirror.”
To help, forward links to America's 1st Freedom articles to any journalist in your area who carries water for gun-control activists.
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