Glazing Over The Facts

If you love America and people who tell the hard truth while wearing a big smile, you should really appreciate Tucker Carlson of the Fox News Channel. I’ve liked the guy since my first exposure to him. He has always held people accountable for the stupid things they say, and has persistently asked the hard questions until he finally gets an answer—or has made it apparent that the person he is questioning just doesn’t have an answer. He also doesn’t care whether his views are popular or well-received: He tells it the way it is and lets the chips fall where they may. In short, he has integrity in a professional field that seems to have moved away from that quality.

Last week, Carlson had Mark Glaze as a guest on his show. Glaze is the silly, simple little dreamer who was the leader of Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety—the typical gun-ban group that goes by a softer, misleading name. Glaze is one of the nuts who really believes that the country would become a loving, peaceful place if only all guns vanished in one magical wave of a fairy’s wand.

I’m going to go ahead and bet that Glaze grew up in a rich, gated community somewhere “special.” He went to a private school with a bunch of other students whose privileged lives look just like his. He’s never faced real evil—the kind of poor-excuse-for-a-human who enjoys hurting and terrifying people just for the sake of hurting and terrifying them. If he had, he’d know his dream of a gun-free world would only make things better for the evil and far worse for the good. It’s not complicated, but simpletons like Glaze are incapable of thinking past their well-insulated lives and emotions.

I give [Glaze] credit for going on Carlson’s show, because he had to have known he was going to get owned.I give him credit for going on Carlson’s show, because he had to have known he was going to get owned. And Carlson did not disappoint: It was marvelous stuff. The segment started out as a criticism of Seattle’s tax on guns and ammunition. Tucker mocked Glaze and his friends for their “faith-based policy making” that drives them to do nothing more than double down on what is so clearly a failed policy.

Things then moved to a general discussion about gun laws and violence. Carlson told Glaze that he couldn’t think of a single state where it is clear that aggressive gun control laws have resulted in lower crime rates. (It should be noted that every federal government entity to ever study the subject would agree.) He referenced Vermont and New Hampshire as two examples. The former traditionally has the lowest crime rate in the country and the fewest gun laws. The latter is usually in the top five when it comes to lowest crime rates and has none of the gun control Glaze dreams about imposing on every American. Its state motto, after all, is still, “Live Free or Die.” 

Glaze said a lot with a single word when he tried to dismiss Carlson’s point, claiming that places like Vermont and New Hampshire can have virtually no gun laws and no violent crime at the same time because they are “country.” I’m sure he didn’t mean to, but he inadvertently admitted that something other than guns really is at the root of the violent crime problem. Of course, he and his friends are lazy and never want to ask the hard questions that might explain the fundamental differences between the populations in the city and the “country” that lead to such dramatic disparity in their respective likelihood of producing violent predators. They just want to go after the gun. Simple “solutions” for simple minds has been a real thing since the beginning of time.

Glaze then tried to tell Carlson that he knew of one of the best stories associated with strict gun control laws in a particular jurisdiction and low crime rates. He mentioned that he worked for Michael Bloomberg in New York City and it is one of the safest big cities in the country.

Unlike most media personalities, old Tucker wasn’t going to let him slide on that ridiculous claim. He pointed out to Glaze and his Fox audience members that New York, two decades ago, was one of the most dangerous places in the world, and that the gun control laws had not changed in any meaningful way between those very grim days and the recent times when violence subsided. So, the rate of violence in the Big Apple improved dramatically over a couple of decades while the draconian gun laws remained the same. Yet Glaze was not fazed. Maybe he just thinks that it took a century for the city’s repugnant Sullivan Act, passed in 1911, to finally have its promised crime-reduction effects. The gun-banners are so hopeless.

Gun control zealots work hard every day to mislead the public and ignore the cold, hard facts.Carlson used Wyoming as another example of a state where virtually every citizen is well-armed, while it always vies for the annual “safest state in the country” title. In an apparent attempt to prove that he has no bounds when it comes to trying to display his detachment from the facts, Glaze took Carlson’s Wyoming bait.

Glaze tried to argue that guns might not lead to violence in Wyoming, but they still lead to many deaths. He then specifically referenced accidents. It’s painfully obvious that he doesn’t care that the Centers for Disease Control reports that there has been a grand total of 47 accidental firearms deaths in that state from 1999-2015. That is an average of less than three each year. The truth is that the state is a shining example of how safe good people are with their guns—but who cares about the facts, right?

At the end of the segment, Carlson asked Glaze why his old boss, Bloomberg, is such a hypocrite by having an extensive detail of well-armed bodyguards. Maybe Glaze thought he was being clever by claiming that the billionaire freedom-hater had to protect himself from “bad guys with guns.” I wonder if he feels weird for inadvertently admitting that NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre was right when he famously told America, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Gun control zealots work hard every day to mislead the public and ignore the cold, hard facts. Glaze tried to stick to this old, tired playbook, but he unintentionally told more truth during his five-minute segment with Carlson than he likely has during most of his career.

I suspect he’s a little ashamed of himself for it. Chances are he will keep himself to networks like MSNBC from here on out.

Don’t miss seeing the entire outstanding Fox News segment here.