Our local newspaper, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, ran a “news” story this weekend dealing with gun crime in Fort Wayne. There have been a rash of people being shot inside their home by gunmen outside of the home. The story, Bullets – and fear – hit home, really is little more than a propaganda piece. The write, Jamie Duffy, relies exclusively on talking points from the extremist gun control group “The Giffords Law Center”, that works to restrict the rights of law-abiding Americans to purchase and own firearms while doing nothing to address gun crime in America.
It was so awful I did something that I haven’t done in years, namely writing a letter to the editor of the Journal Gazette. My letter is reproduced below:
Many journalists seem utterly baffled when they realize the public no longer trusts the media to present the news without bias. The recent article by Jamie Duffy, “Bullets – and fear – hit home”, is a perfect example of why the American public has little faith in the media and should provide a lesson for journalists.
Purporting to be a news story about the rash of shootings into homes in Fort Wayne, what was presented instead was a thinly veiled propaganda piece referencing talking points from the far left Giffords Law Center, an outfit that changes names on a regular basis, and that pushes for extreme gun control measures. The Giffords Law Center claims that “requiring a background check”, something we are all already required to submit to in order to buy a gun from a retailer, and instituting a waiting period will “help reduce the problem”. Meanwhile earlier in the very same story we read that many of the suspects in these shootings are juveniles: “Many are teenagers and some of them are barely old enough to be called a teenager.”. Perhaps Jamie Duffy and the “experts” at the Gifford Law Center are unaware of the law but it is already illegal to sell a handgun to anyone under 21. How exactly would background checks and a waiting period reduce crime when the people committing the crime are already obtaining these firearms illegally? It would seem like Journalism 101 to not contradict yourself in a single article.
Mandating additional background checks and waiting periods won’t do anything to reduce gun crime in Indiana and no one seriously thinks it will do anything other than make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens in Indiana to obtain legal firearms. If the Journal Gazette wants to see a reduction on gun violence, maybe they should spotlight the areas of our community where gun violence actually occurs instead of publishing anti-2nd Amendment propaganda? There are some difficult questions to ask and some hard conversation to have. Will the Journal Gazette ask those questions?
Gun crime in Fort Wayne is almost exclusively found in the black community. Most of the media is afraid to mention this but those same journalists are always ready to back bogus statistics to disarm law-abiding Americans. These specific crimes are being committed by “teens”, which is code for black males under 18. They can’t own a handgun or any gun legally but still manage to get them anyway. Groups like the “Gifford Law Center” don’t care about actual gun violence, not really. Their goal is complete disarmament, registry, confiscation. Things like waiting periods and background checks simply serve as an incremental step. Our side does the same thing with abortion. The goal of the pro-life movement is the total abolition of abortion but short of the SCOTUS repealing Roe v Wade, the next best way is to make it incrementally harder to get an abortion and it works pretty well. The gun-grabbers understand this and their willing pawns in the media are complicit in pushing this agenda.
It sounds like the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette is actually going to publish my letter to the editor. We’ll see. Regardless this is just one more example of the media pushing an agenda rather than reporting the news.