Editor’s note: This is in response to a letter this author had published in the Daily Lobo on April 2. (See “Give up my guns? Right after you do, politicians.”) The letter states government entities and institutions should not be treated differently than citizens in respect to gun rights and armed protection.
Editor,
In comments online to my recent letter concerning gun laws, the topic of media censorship was raised a couple of times. This is an area of grave concern to those of us who love liberty, because freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas are so fundamental to all our basic rights. It should be a topic of special interest to the Daily Lobo, given the recent episode with the CNM Chronicle. Media censorship by means of not covering a topic is rampant, and it is repugnant. Two illustrations are in order.
In the context of firearms, the problem is observable in the fact that while the “mainstream media” give wall-to-wall coverage of many shooting crimes, they give no coverage whatsoever to the hundreds of thousands of times a firearm is used, often without being fired, to prevent a crime from occurring. Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck estimates guns prevent some 2.5 million crimes a year, including some 550 rapes, 1,100 murders and 5,200 other violent crimes a day. Less than 0.9 percent of the time is the gun ever actually fired. Even if his estimate is extremely high, the conclusion that guns save more lives than they take is on very solid footing. But that’s not my point here. The point is “the media” never broach this subject. Biased antigun entertainers would certainly avoid this aspect of the story of gun laws; responsible journalists would not.
Consider how the recent call for more gun laws was sparked by the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School and the resultant media attention. Twenty children, often referred to as “babies,” were slaughtered by an evil lunatic. This horrific tragedy has received massive media attention, as it well should. But at the same time, the Philadelphia trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell is now going on, and the media have been quiet as a tomb. Gosnell is on trial for eight counts of murder. One count relates to a woman killed by improper anesthesia, but seven of those counts are for murder in the first degree for the deaths of seven viable babies allegedly killed when Gosnell and his staff snipped their spines outside the womb. The number of viable babies so murdered is believed to be much higher, possibly 100. Those babies were killed every bit as dead by this evil barbarian’s scissors as were the children at Sandy Hook by an evil barbarian’s bullets.
I don’t care where you stand on abortion here. This is a case of cold-blooded, violent murder. But where is the media coverage of this trial? It has been nonexistent. Not one major story has been presented by the “mainstream media.” Not one. Where is the outrage over this horrific tragedy? No calls for investigations, no cries for inspections of such clinics. Just deathly silence.
As a free people, we must demand better of major media outlets.
Personally, I’d like to see the Lobo take a stand on this issue.
John Bauer
Daily Lobo reader
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