There’s no doubt that the mainstream media has a profound anti-gun bias. We know it, and we can see it, but it’s not as obvious to a lot of people who don’t delve as deeply into Second Amendment topics as most of us do. That’s because it’s rarely as obvious as “gun control is awesome and only terrible people support it,” unless it’s a quote from someone else. That allows the so-called journalist to pretend they said no such thing; they were only quoting an individual.
And even that is rare, in part because the reporter knows how it will blow up in their face.
But over at Rocky Mountain Voice, Cory Gaines responds to a recent article, and it illustrates a good part of what it actually looks like. The story he’s responding to is about high school trap shooting teams in rural parts of Colorado. So far, fair enough.
Then we get into the reporter crossing the line by injecting anti-gun talking points into the story.
Sneaking gun control talking points into an article, without any alternative interpretations or context, helps them become common sense. It allows advocates to, as they’ve so often done through the liberal media, get their piece in without facing any counterarguments, until such “chestnuts” (as Ross calls gun rights arguments), become truth.
Let me show you with a couple non-contiguous quotes (pasted here in the same order they appear in Ms. Ross’ piece, with embedded links intact):
“And for kids, ‘even living in a home with a gun increases the risk of gun violence, but particularly when they start to have direct access to firearms themselves. The reality is that gun violence is a leading cause of death for kids and teens in this country‘ [researcher for gun control advocates Giffords Kelly] Drane said.”
“Since Colorado passed a flurry of gun laws starting in 2021, homicides have decreased by 29.5% statewide, aggravated assaults by 11.7% and violent crime by 13.3%, according to the Colorado Department of Criminal Justice 2025 midyear Colorado Crime Trends report.”
The first link leads one to Giffords, with a graph that shows what the quote claims to show. However, Gaines points out that the data doesn’t include any source or methodology. We don’t know explicitly where they come from, which means they should be viewed with skepticism.
That’s especially true when you remember that these studies routinely omit anyone under the age of 1. That would drive down the numbers massively, making them almost a non-issue. Plus, when you look at a breakdown by age, you find that such deaths are almost non-existent for children under 12. The next cohort in the breakdown is ages 12 to 17, which includes a lot more people who are potentially involved in criminal enterprises at a young age.
But as it’s not included, it’s just a claim that people will take at face value, and for what? These aren’t inner-city kids running around with auto-sear equipped Glocks shooting up entire neighborhoods because someone rolled their eyes at the wrong moment. These are kids engaged in a competitive sport that has a lower injury rate than almost every other high school sport.
The stats have no place here except to paint the sport as part of a problem. Plus, by repeating the same claims over and over again, they burn into the mind as if they’re facts, simply because few people will bother to actually question them.
Now, let’s talk about the next quote. Yes, I have no doubt that the homicide rate dropped significantly after 2021. That’s because it dropped everywhere since 2021. Right now, for example, the real-time crime data shows we’re down more than 18 percent since this time last year nationwide, which is part of the trend we’ve been seeing. Interestingly, Colorado is up two percent compared to last year’s data.
Plus, nationwide, it dropped around 40 percent over that time period.
What we have in that quote is something called post hoc, ergo propter hoc. That’s Latin for “after, therefore, because of.” It’s an informal logical fallacy that tries to suggest that because a given thing happens after something else happened, then it’s because of that previous thing. In this case, gun control was passed in 2021, and all these violent crime rates fell as a direct result of that gun control being passed.
As we can see, though, it fell nationwide by a greater percentage than in Colorado, and without that “flurry” of gun control being passed.
Now, there is one sin that doesn’t seem to be in the piece Gaines is addressing, but I’ve seen it often enough that I feel I need to include it. Often, journalists cite “experts” who make all kinds of gun control arguments. This is a common enough tactic because it lets the reporter hide behind a veneer of objectivity, since they made no such claims, the experts did.
But the “experts” are universally from anti-gun organizations or think tanks. Everytown and Giffords aren’t unbiased entities searching for the truth. They’re gun control organizations that have yet to actually do or support anything that might remotely look pro-gun. It’s because that’s not their mission, no matter what they say.
As a result, these “experts” have a profound bias that isn’t acknowledged. They rarely seek out experts from the other side of the fence so as to provide a more balanced story where the audience can decide for themselves which argument is more convincing. Instead, they simply cite their “experts” as if there’s nothing wrong.
More insidious are those from the “public health” or “legal” groups at most colleges and universities that supposedly delve into so-called gun violence. Those, too, are anti-gun, and we know it because they have never once made any case for firearms being beneficial. They have never opposed a gun control law as being too far constitutionally or not being beneficial to the public good, with one notable exception.
This isn’t a mistake. This is by design.
As Gaines notes, these “chestnuts” infest people’s minds and, in time, are taken as simple matters of fact that aren’t challenged intellectually because, well, no one realizes they’re contestable in the first place.
If the media wants to know why we don’t trust them anymore, this is why. This crap right here.
They’re never going to change, though, because they refuse to accept they’re doing anything wrong.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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