False Flags In the Gun Debate

Last night PBS’ NewsHour chose to focus on the debate and vote today in Congress on the Tiahrt Amendment. Dave Kopel has a nice writeup here on the real significance of the Amendment to gun owners. Don’t forget to CALL YOUR CONGRESSCRITTER TODAY and urge him or her to support the Amendment (it’s pronounced TEE-ART).

UPDATE: The NewsHour didn’t make it clear, but apparently the vote today is not on the House floor, but only in the Appropriations Committee. Committee members are listed here. I called my local Congresspersons, and as none of them are on the Appropriations Committee, their staff had no idea what the Tiahrt Amendment was. Hopefully a flood of calls from NRA types will “wake them up.”

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What I found hilarious about the NewsHour segment (transcript here) was that neither Congressman Tiahrt nor the Mayor debating him would admit what the debate’s really about. This is unusual for the NewsHour; generally if a guest tries to just recite talking points, the anchor sees right through it and starts asking more difficult questions.

It seems to me everybody in Washington knows the Mayors don’t want the trace data in order to prevent crimes; they want it so they and their plaintiffs’ attorneys can build better lawsuits against gun dealers and distributors, now that manufacturers are off-limits.

On the other side, Tiahrt’s amendment is about protecting not merely undercover ATF officers, as he asserts, but more importantly the privacy of individual citizens who happen to own firearms. But despite plenty of opportunities to discuss that aspect of the bill, he stuck to his talking points (“the amendment protects those who protect us,” which is a nice slogan but starts to sound trite after he repeats it a bunch of times).

Sometimes it’s fun to watch this inside-baseball stuff (you can listen to it here) but really, anchor Judy Woodruff should have put these two in their place 30 seconds into the debate and gotten to the real issues here. Unless she has some sort of agenda….? Naaw, couldn’t be….
BTW, is it just me, or has the NewsHour been running more left-of-center pieces than usual now that Judy Woodruff’s back?