NRA Sheds Light on Manipulated Gun Experiment Conducted by ABC News

From Americas Right blog:

Thursday, June 18, 2009

If ABC is willing to manipulate so-called 'experiments' to make their point on guns and immigration, what should we expect with healthcare?

When I was young, it was Sports Illustrated. I couldn't wait for Rick Reilly's expertly-written column, for the photography that made me marvel at the capabilities of light, film and talent. For a while a few years ago, it was The Weekly Standard, but I quickly found that the commentaries I was reading in paper form could essentially be found online days earlier. Now, I only receive two magazines -- one being a publication distributed by the Auburn Alumni Association, the other being the National Rifle Association's American Rifleman.

When I came home to work to find that the latter had arrived in my mailbox yesterday, I tore it open. My first stop is always the Armed Citizen section, a collection of abstracts from recent news accounts of ordinary Americans like you and me stopping home invasions and other crimes in the process with the help of boundless courage and their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. To me, the Armed Citizen shows America in a nutshell -- thanks to a little self-reliance, the independent-thinking righteous person is capable of anything.

A few pages past that, I stumbled across a fantastic article by NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox on a shamelessly manipulated "experiment" conducted and publicized by ABC News' 20/20, the same ABC News scheduled to broadcast health care propaganda from the Blue Room and East Room of the White House next week. The so-called "experiment" was meant to prove that handguns are simply ineffective with regard to self-defense against mass shooters, using a university setting as a backdrop.

Sounds like an interesting idea, save for ABC News' penchant for faking such "experiments." After all, it was ABC's John Quinones who staged a situation intended to expose everyday Americans' racism toward illegal immigrants, going so far as to hire a paid actor to elicit controversial remarks. From a January 6, 2009 article at Newsbusters:

Correspondent John Quinones, the host of a series of ABC hidden camera specials designed to test how people react to ethical situations, appeared to preview a new edition that featured a cashier in a New Jersey deli yelling at a Hispanic customer.

The ABC crew had the pretend employee scream at a confused day laborer, saying things such as "We're building walls to keep you guys out of the country! You don't speak English, you don't get service! We don't serve your kind here!" Quinones then theatrically lectured, "...On this day, the only thing they [the customers] are being served is prejudice." He later observed that the experiment "uncovered some of the dark impulses many of us share."

In the gun-related "experiment" cited by the NRA's Cox, ABC News armed college students interested in employing firearms for self-defense purposes, staged a classroom situation, and simulated the entry of gun-wielding mass shooters such as those seen at so many of our nation's schools and shopping malls. The problems were numerous. First, the armed student in the equation was provided with ill-fitting gear, making a clean draw nearly impossible. Second, the student was always seated in the same place: in the front row of the simulated classroom, right in the middle. Worse yet, the perpetrator was portrayed by a police shooting instructor -- and knew in advance where the armed student was seated from the beginning.

Through the use of paint ammunition, ABC used its "experiment" to demonstrate that armed students who dare stand up to a mass shooter was usually killed before he or she could stop the shooter. When the student actually did well despite the odds stacked against him or her, advantages to a shooter that may not be there in real life, ABC's Diane Sawyer--a propagandist masquarading as a journalist--brushed it off.

So much for embracing opposition. ABC's penchant for shaping opinions through a carefully set agenda is worrisome, considering that ABC News has been invited by the Barack Obama administration to set up shop next Wednesday in the East Room and Blue Room of the White House to sell the Democrats' disastrous health care plan to an increasingly skeptical public. It is a purely defensive move by Obama and his flunkies -- Republicans and even some Blue Dog Democrats on Capitol Hill are having success in explaining to the American people how the president's plan will cost upwards of $1.6 trillion--money we would need to borrow or print--and really not expand coverage to that many people now uninsured, not to mention the adverse effects that such a plan will have on the quality and availability of care.

For that reason, the mainstream press is a natural partner for the Obama White House. Like the adminstration, the Obama-loving media has no problem manipulating facts, lying to those paying attention, and creating a crisis in order to advance its agenda. In "20/20 Turns a Blind Eye on Self-Defense," for example, Cox compares the faked ABC gun experiment to the famous case of Dateline NBC and the exploding pick-up trucks, a fabricated story for which the news magazine program was so intent upon conveying the results it wanted to convey that it actually strapped explosives to vehicles to demonstrate how the trucks supposedly blew up during collisions.

With that kind of integrity, what can we expect from the mainstream press in shilling for their Messiah's health care agenda? Already we see that ABC has refused to air advertisements during the special programming from groups opposing the administration's plan.

The truth has never much mattered to news organizations like ABC News. In the case of the gun "experiment," time and time again stories like those featured in the Armed Citizen section of American Rifleman highlight how ordinary people can save lives including and beyond their own, but ABC mentions them not. No word of the undercover police officer--carrying a weapon against mall policy--who stopped a mass shooting in progress at the Trolley Square Mall. No word of the students that averted a tragedy at Appalachian Law School. Even last week's horrible shooting at the National Holocaust Museum underscores the importance of an armed populace -- uniformed security guards stopped shooter James von Brunn by using him. Yes, they may have been in uniform, but the issue isn't as much about the guard badge and uniform as it is about the guns and the brave souls trained to use them.

There are very, very few armed guards at my law school. There are very, very few armed guards at shopping malls across the country. Our safety and security is up to us, my friends. Unfortunately, my school's policy renders my concealed carry permit useless and the nearest mall has "gun-free zone" signs posted all around -- the same sort of signs and policies were in effect at Virginia Tech, Columbine High School, the Trolley Square Mall and more.

This country needs to have a frank, detailed discussion on the issue of guns, just as it must talk about health care and energy as well. But this administration and Congress doesn't want that. They know common sense and an independent American public are stacked up against them, and that the only way to prevail on their proposals is by cramming it down the American people's throat with little if any time given to true opposition. On guns, the best way to do that is through reports like the one shown on 20/20; on health care, it's through shutting down all opposition response.

Reports like the ones broadcasted by ABC News and 20/20 do nothing good for anybody. When it comes to firearms, such reports embolden criminals, ensure that law-abiding citizens are subject to more scrutiny than those who choose to break the law, and therefore make people more unsafe. On immigration, they work hard to elicit a response that may not truly be there. On health care, they cheapen a solid debate rooted in common sense.

But they fit the liberal agenda, and that is all that matters.