My Encounter with the Media
In the late 1980s I sent about eight manila envelopes filled with progun data that completely refuted the antigun movement’s position to the publisher and several editors of New York Newsday. My challenge to them was to read the material and then to provide me with a study that definitively proved that gun control actually worked in America. I made it clear that they were not to include foreign studies from Handgun Control, Inc. Shortly thereafter, and to my dismay and utter surprise, an editor by the name of Joseph Dolman responded to me and my reaction was one of incredulity when I read his remarks. He cited a study about how low the violent crime rate was in Britain and asserted that this was due to a handgun ban. His source? Handgun Control, Inc. – which I explicitly asked him not to include.
He then proceeded to reveal more woeful ignorance by asking me the following:
“How come the NRA isn’t litigating the 2nd Amendment issue in the federal courts? Because they know they would lose.” Duh! I wrote him back to chastise him for using HCI and for being unaware that a simple phone call to the NRA would enable him to find out exactly what their legislative agenda was – including on the federal level. To me it was an eye opener, an epiphany if you will, that a so-called journalist could be so poorly informed about an important issue like gun control. I had always thought that all journalists were well informed about the pressing issues of our day. Pardon my naiveté. He never responded to my follow up letter.
A few months later my mouth dropped open when I read a byline by Dolman arguing for more gun control. His reason? His wife was robbed on Eastern Parkway by a thug with an “assault rifle”. The incident had occurred prior to receiving my progun material. What I learned was that not only was he poorly informed about the gun issue but that he was obviously biased too based on his wife’s terrifying ordeal in Brooklyn. As I closely monitored the media it became apparent that he was in good company because virtually every large metropolitan area newspaper held the same views. But let’s not confuse them with the facts.