My Newest Post at BigGovernment: "Media Matters’ Potentially Lethal Distortions on Guns"

My piece starts this way:

Everyone wants to keep guns away from criminals, but gun control advocates, such as Media Matters, don’t want to acknowledge that there are costs to disarming law-abiding citizens. Lately Media Matters has particularly been incensed that anyone would point out that the vast majority of denials from Brady Act background checks involve so-called “false positives” — law-abiding citizens incorrectly being identified as banned individuals.

Media Matters claims that all those stopped by the background checks from buying guns are prohibited individuals, that no mistakes are made by the government. And Media Matters is willing to engage in any amount of name calling and fraudulent photos to attack those who question their claims.

There are several things to understand about how the Brady Law background check process works. At gun stores or other registered dealers, would-be buyers have to fill out a form asking whether there are any criminal convictions or types of mental illness that would prevent them from legally purchasing the weapon. Falsely answering these questions amounts to perjury. If someone answers the question by saying that they have a background that prohibits them from buying, a gun dealers stop right there and do not even process those forms. And if someone is believed to have knowingly provided false information on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) form and prosecutors believe that they can prove that knowingly false information was provided, the would-be buyer faces prosecution. . . .

The piece has also be posted over at BigJournalism where it is the featured article, and the comments there are available here.

UPDATE: After getting caught redhanded, Media Matters' defense is that the just didn't realize that somehow they had posted a doctored picture. Media Matters claims to be an expert on the most minute details of my life, including frequent visits to my website where there is a picture of me, but at the same time they claim they had no idea what I really looked like and thus they blame an unnamed someone else for having doctored my picture without their knowledge.



Media Matters claims that "Lott offers nothing to back up that assertion" that they will falsify photographic information. They have just been caught using a photograph of me multiple times that edited the color of my hair, skin, and clothes and distorting my hair. But heck they now claim that they didn't really know what I looked like. Media Matters instead tries reiterating their earlier claim that they hadn't altered one of my quotes after getting caught doing that also. Now they claim they didn't know what I looked like when they use a doctored photo of me, and they say it is fixed anyway because they have changed the picture. Sorry, but changing the photo after you have been caught doesn't undo what was done to begin with. For a website that has made it impossible for me to respond on their website to their many false claims, it isn't too surprising to see the way that Media Matters tries to extricate themselves from these false claims when they are caught.