The legacy media has mostly given up the pretense of carrying out its once-professed mission – holding power to account. At this point, no reasonable person expects the regime press to cover legitimate news that might reflect poorly on their political allies. Still, conspicuous ignorance is one thing, distortion is another.
At an August 3 campaign rally in Atlanta, President Donald Trump told those gathered that Vice President Kamala Harris “supports mandatory gun confiscation.” On August 7, the ill-named PolitiFact rated Trump’s statement “mostly false.”
As NRA-ILA has regularly documented, Trump is correct. Harris has repeatedly supported prohibiting and confiscating commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms, including America’s most popular rifle – the AR-15.
At a 2020 presidential campaign event in Londonderry, N.H. in September 2019, then-presidential candidate Harris told reporters that confiscation of commonly-owned semi-automatic firearms was “a good idea.” Elaborating on her support for a compulsory “buyback” program, the senator added, “We have to work out the details -- there are a lot of details -- but I do…We have to take those guns off the streets.”
On the September 16, 2019 episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” Harris reiterated her support for gun confiscation. During a question-and-answer session, an audience member asked Harris “Do you believe in the mandatory buyback of quote-unquote assault weapons and whether or not you do, how does that idea not go against fundamentally the Second Amendment?”
The candidate responded, “I do believe that we need to do buybacks.” Making clear that she believes Americans’ Second Amendment rights are for sale, Harris added “A buyback program is a good idea. Now we need to do it the right way. And part of that has to be, you know, buy back and give people their value, the financial value.”
Further demonstrating Harris’s commitment to gun confiscation, the candidate called for a “mandatory buyback program” during an October 3, 2019 MSNBC gun control forum and again during a November 2019 interview with NBC Nightly News.
Given Harris’s obvious and indisputable record of support for gun confiscation, a reasonable person might wonder how a news outlet could rebut Trump’s accurate statement. PolitiFact’s lazy reasoning boiled down to: That was then, this is now. And PolitiFact’s sole piece of “evidence” for their conclusion? Less than a sentence from a New York Times article that cited Harris “campaign officials.”
So, Americans can either believe the actual presidential candidate’s repeated calls for gun confiscation in her own words on video or a second-hand account of what a campaign official supposedly said to a regime press outlet about a purported flip-flop on an unpopular policy. Are Americans supposed to believe so-called “factcheckers” are this gullible, or is there something else at play? There is a reason statements against interest are given special weight in court.
Moreover, while PolitiFact may want to portray 2019 as ancient history, there’s more recent evidence that Harris supports gun confiscation. Noticeably absent from the PolitiFact piece was any mention of Harris’s October 26, 2023 remarks at a state luncheon with Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Harris praised Australia’s gun control measures - the most famous of which was the Aussie equivalent of Harris’s gun confiscation proposal. Referencing violence perpetrated with firearms, Harris remarked, “And let us be clear, it does not have to be this way, as our friends in Australia have demonstrated.” (emphasis added).
In 1996, Australia adopted a near total ban on civilian ownership of semi-automatic rifles and semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns. To coincide with the new restrictions, the government instituted a mandatory “buyback” confiscation scheme where gun owners were required to turn their newly-prohibited firearms over to the government for a set price.
Thankfully, fewer and fewer Americans are relying on the regime press to mediate reality. In October, Gallup reported the results of a recent poll, stating,
The 32% of Americans who say they trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way ties Gallup’s lowest historical reading, previously recorded in 2016.
…
Another 29% of U.S. adults have “not very much” trust, while a record-high 39% register “none at all.”
On June 26, the Washington Post published a piece titled “A new measure of Americans’ deep distrust of the media.” The item explained,
Americans simply don’t trust the media, particularly when it comes to politics. Swing-state polling from The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University found that only 3 in 10 residents of six of the most important states in this year’s presidential election trust that the media will fairly and accurately report political news. Seven in 10 indicated that they had not too much trust in that occurring — or that they had no trust at all.
The notion that the legacy press is unbiased is quite literally laughable. A visible manifestation of this sentiment occurred on the August 12 episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Audience members burst into laughter when the host, in all seriousness, suggested that CNN is objective.
With the regime press losing all semblance of credibility, NRA members and other gun rights activists should work even harder to share the facts about about the dangers Harris poses to the Second Amendment and gun ownership with their family, friends, neighbors, and other freedom-minded individuals.
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