It’s true for anything, but especially for guns: if you tell a lie enough times, the establishment media will believe it.
Consider “assault weapons.” There is no such thing, but the term is employed as a hazy legal description of terrifying-looking rifles like the AR-15, which were prohibited under former President Bill Clinton’s administration.
According to Democrat legend, the prohibition reduced gun violence – yet the restriction expired after 10 years, and gun violence increased throughout President George W. Bush’s term.
Following a string of catastrophic murders, President Joe Biden and Democrats are waving the bloody shirt again, demanding another ban on “assault weapons.” On Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre used a press briefing to say Biden “has called on Republicans in Congress to work together with Democrats to take action to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
The comments came after a Louisville, Kentucky shooting carried out at a bank by a man The New York Times reported was “a current employee” of the bank.
During the media briefing, according to a White House transcript, Jean-Pierre was asked whether Biden was “effectively, at this point, powerless” to enact the kind of gun control legislation he wants.
After Jean-Pierre said Biden “has done more executive action than any other president when it comes to gun violence, when it comes to stemming gun violence, when it comes to protecting our communities or schools,” she added that he “cannot do it alone.”
And then we moved on to the great “assault weapon ban” lie.
“If you think about assault — an assault weapons ban, we know, when we saw — when the president was involved in 1994 to get that done, we saw gun violence go down. And when it sunset 10 years later, it went back up,” Jean-Pierre said.
“So we know what could work. And that’s why you continue to hear the president calling on Congress to take action.”
KJP: "If you think about Assault Weapons Ban…We saw gun violence go down. When it sunset 10 years laters, it went back up!" pic.twitter.com/4TUTkUSNNP
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 10, 2023
Except, as conservative radio host and gun rights activist Dana Loesch noted: “This literally never happened.”
And she had the receipts:
This literally never happened.
Here's the DOJ saying it didn't happen https://t.co/H4IPoUBHVF
Here's JAMA saying it didn't happenhttps://t.co/L8RsI35nq9
Here's RAND saying it didn't happenhttps://t.co/eRff2Pwmh0
Here's NYT saying it didn't happen https://t.co/Q6Db7XhuQA https://t.co/pQn778L7YN
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 10, 2023
The most devastating and direct admission of the futility of banning so-called “assault weapons” was a piece published in The New York Times in 2014, which stated that “in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.”
“It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do,” Lois Beckett, a reporter for the liberal news outlet ProPublica, wrote in the Times “news analysis.”
“In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.
“The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle. This, in turn, obscures some grim truths about who is really dying from gunshots.”
Beckett noted that the 1994 gun law resulted from a crime spike in the early-1990s, when “Democrats decided to push for a ban of what seemed like the most dangerous guns in America: assault weapons, which were presented by the media as the gun of choice for drug dealers and criminals, and which many in law enforcement wanted to get off the streets.”
However, these firearms accounted for only 2% of gun crimes, while pistols were employed in more than 80% of gun homicides.
Then there’s the Department of Justice’s own research, conducted before the bill expired, which determined that the prohibition had no effect on gun crimes and would likely have little effect in the future.
“Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” the study stated.
“[Assault weapons] were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. [Large-capacity magazines] are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading.”
And then there was an independent 2017 study which, while still arguing for the efficacy of stronger gun control laws, found this: “Specific laws directed at firearm trafficking, improving child safety, or the banning of military-style assault weapons were not associated with changes in firearm homicide rates.”
So, no, what Jean-Pierre stated did not actually occur. But continue to lie about these so-called “assault weapons.” Continue to believe that these “weapons of war” are to blame for what are, at the core, crises of mental health and cultural decay.
Rest assured, if the Biden administration got its wish — which it will not, but let us speculate — there would be a new boogeyman when nothing happened. Handguns that fire semiautomatically. Revolvers. The NRA. The Second Amendment is a constitutional amendment.
And there will be lies about them as well. All because a gullible media elite is always willing to believe those lies.