If you happened to be a video game aficionado during the early to mid aughts, you were no doubt swept up in the raging controversy: Do violent shooter video games beget real-world violence?
Nearly 20 years later and it’s still not clear whether violent video games, movies and other media cause violent behavior, but it is clear that they’ve had an effect on the population — just not in the way those cultural fear-mongers would have had you believe.
Take “The View” co-host Joy Behar, for example.
It’s not clear where Behar stands on the violent media vs. violent behavior debate, but what is clear is that violent media has radically skewed her understanding of how real life works.
Behar demonstrated this astounding lack of understanding during Friday’s episode of “The View,” when the panel’s co-hosts brought up the horrifying and tragic topic of the Maine mass shooter.
You can watch the relevant segment below, but see if you can spot the point where Behar jumps the shark:
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As one would come to expect of a far-left program like “The View,” the conversation about the Maine shooter quickly devolved into the standard Second Amendment bashing you’d come to expect from leftists in the wake of any senseless shooting.
But Behar took things a bit further by trying to illustrate the dangers of the AR-15 by using a completely nonsensical explanation that you have to hear to believe.
After co-host Sara Haines mentioned the uses of guns as hunting instruments, Behar ignorantly interjected, “But also if you shoot with an AR-15, let’s say you shoot a deer, you can’t eat it. Because you basically demolished the animal.”
Now, if an AR-15 were in the hands of John McClane or John Wick (two highly skilled and highly fictitious gun wielders), or this hunting trip was set in Grand Theft Auto 5 or a Michael Bay movie, sure, maybe the deer explodes in a reddish mist of blood and bits for dramatic effect.
But in the real world? An AR-15 might leave an exit wound on a deer, given that most rifles of that model take 5.56 mm or .223 Remington cartridges — lethal ammunition to be sure, but a far cry from the grenade launcher that Behar is making the AR-15 out to be.
And look, this might seem like a minute detail that isn’t worth quibbling over, but the dishonest depths that the left will stoop to infringe on your inalienable Second Amendment rights cannot be so easily dismissed.
These are people using demonstrably false, intentionally scary rhetoric to sway public opinion on the Second Amendment, and that should be called out and excoriated to the strongest degree.
Listen, if someone wants to have an honest and uncomfortable discussion about the Second Amendment in 2023, that’s a conversation worth having, even if both sides will ultimately disagree.
What’s not worth having is this dishonest, disingenuous and despicable fear-mongering using blatantly false information to sway that conversation.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
