Can’t balance that household budget? No gun rights for you!

I enthusiastically  recommend Reason, both the magazine and the website. I am far from being a libertarian, but their reporting and analysis is consistently fair, balanced and perceptive. If I were teaching high school, I’d assign it regularly.

Here is a recent example. Reason’s Scott Shackford correctly flagged the incompetent and misleading media narrative that President Trump eliminated a wise Obama measure that kept guns out of the hands of dangerous mentally ill individuals. The usual media hacks pushed this narrative on the public, like CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who tweeted to Trump,

“Are you aware that one of the regulations you got rid of made it more difficult for mentally ill to get guns?”

ABC News..

“One of the only major actions that Pres. Trump has taken on gun control is to block an Obama-era rule that made it harder for the mentally ill to have access to guns.”

Trump-deranged Washington Post conservative Jennifer Rubin…

“Almost a year ago Trump signed a bill rolling back Obama measure making it harder for mentally ill to get guns”

The Daily Beast:

“A year ago today, the Senate rolled back an Obama regulation that would have prevented 75,000 severely mentally ill people from buying guns and put them “in the hands of people too mentally unstable to manage their own bank accounts”

The degree of ignorance regarding mental illness and Constitutional rights displayed by these and others is horrifying.

Writes Shackford,

A year ago, Congress and Trump eliminated a proposed rule that would have included in the federal government gun background database people who received disability payments from Social Security and received assistance to manage their benefits due to mental impairments.

This is a regulation that potentially deprived between 75,000 to 80,000 people of a right based not on what they had done but on the basis of being classified by the government in a certain way. The fact that these people may have these impairments did not inherently mean that they were dangerous to themselves or others and needed to be kept away from guns.

As I noted when the regulation was repealed last March, this rule violated not just the Second Amendment but the Fourth [Note:He means the Fifth...]  , because it deprived the affected people of a right without due process. The government does have the power to restrict and even deny gun ownership to people, but it has to show that these people have engaged in behavior that makes weapons dangerous in their hands.

That’s why the regulation was opposed not just by National Rifle Association (NRA) but by several mental health and disability groups and by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Exactly correct. Shackford isn’t a lawyer, but he is more competent in Constitutional law than either lawyers Cuomo or Barack Obama. The discrimination faced by those citizens with mental and emotional illnesses is bad enough without Obama’s pandering to anti-gun hysterics and tarring the mentally ill as automatic threats to shoot up schools. There is no nexus between “not being able to manage their own bank accounts” and not being fit to exercise their Constitutional rights.

Hell, I can’t manage my bank account.

Naturally, since the anti-gun news media is insufficiently committed toreporting the facts, and the anti-gun Left is not interested at all in being truthful, only the baaaaad NRA was referenced as culprits in this correct call by President Trump, not the good ACLU. That would have confused people, you see. Confused, as in “this issue isn’t as simple as Democrats make it out to be.”

If the anti-gun activists could win this debate on facts, law and logic, I presume they would try. Since they are constantly relying on misinformation, defiance of the Bill of Rights and hacks like Chris Cuomo instead, it is fair to assume that they can’t.

ADDENDUM: Prof Glenn Reynold posted the Reason piece on Facebook, and Facebook fact-checked him! After all, if a law professor posts an article pointing out how anti-gun activists in the media distort facts to fit their narrative, it must be fake news.

Do progressives really like what’s going on? Do they think this blatant effort to manipulate public opinion so it supports a leftward agenda is a good thing? Do they really? Is honesty, integrity and fairness that disposable?