It’s true for anything, but especially true for guns: If you repeat a lie often enough, it gets believed by the establishment media.
Take so-called “assault weapons.” No such thing really exists, but the term is used as a vague legal description of scary-looking guns like the AR-15 that were banned during former President Bill Clinton’s administration.
If we’re to believe Democrat lore, gun violence went down because of the ban — but then, the ban expired after 10 years and gun violence went up during President George W. Bush’s administration.
Now, after a spate of mass shootings, President Joe Biden and the Democrats are waving the bloody shirt, demanding another ban on “assault weapons.” We heard the same lies again on Monday when White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre used a media briefing to note Biden “has called on Republicans in Congress to work together with Democrats to take action to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
The comments came after a Louisville, Kentucky. shooting carried out at a bank by a man The New York Times reported was “a current employee” of the bank.
During the media briefing, according to a White House transcript, Jean-Pierre was asked whether Biden was “effectively, at this point, powerless” to enact the kind of gun control legislation he wants.
After Jean-Pierre said Biden “has done more executive action than any other president when it comes to gun violence, when it comes to stemming gun violence, when it comes to protecting our communities or schools,” she added that he “cannot do it alone.”
And then we moved onto the great “assault weapon ban” lie.
“If you think about assault — an assault weapons ban, we know, when we saw — when the president was involved in 1994 to get that done, we saw gun violence go down. And when it sunset 10 years later, it went back up,” Jean-Pierre said.
“So we know what could work. And that’s why you continue to hear the president calling on Congress to take action.”
KJP: “If you think about Assault Weapons Ban…We saw gun violence go down. When it sunset 10 years laters, it went back up!” pic.twitter.com/4TUTkUSNNP
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 10, 2023
Except, as conservative radio host and gun rights activist Dana Loesch noted: “This literally never happened.”
And she had the receipts:
This literally never happened.
Here’s the DOJ saying it didn’t happen https://t.co/H4IPoUBHVF
Here’s JAMA saying it didn’t happenhttps://t.co/L8RsI35nq9
Here’s RAND saying it didn’t happenhttps://t.co/eRff2Pwmh0
Here’s NYT saying it didn’t happen https://t.co/Q6Db7XhuQA https://t.co/pQn778L7YN
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 10, 2023
Probably the most devastating and straightforward admission of the futility of banning so-called “assault weapons” was the piece published by The New York Times’ in 2014, which noted “in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.”
“It turns out that big, scary military rifles don’t kill the vast majority of the 11,000 Americans murdered with guns each year. Little handguns do,” Lois Beckett, a reporter for the liberal news outlet ProPublica, wrote in the Times “news analysis.”
“In 2012, only 322 people were murdered with any kind of rifle, F.B.I. data shows.
“The continuing focus on assault weapons stems from the media’s obsessive focus on mass shootings, which disproportionately involve weapons like the AR-15, a civilian version of the military M16 rifle. This, in turn, obscures some grim truths about who is really dying from gunshots.”
Beckett noted that the 1994 gun law resulted from a crime spike in the early-1990s, when “Democrats decided to push for a ban of what seemed like the most dangerous guns in America: assault weapons, which were presented by the media as the gun of choice for drug dealers and criminals, and which many in law enforcement wanted to get off the streets.”
However, these guns only accounted for 2 percent of gun crimes, while handguns were used in over 80 percent of gun murders.
Then there’s the Department of Justice’s own study before the bill sunset, which found the ban made little difference in gun crimes and would likely make no difference in the future.
“Should it be renewed, the ban’s effects on gun violence are likely to be small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement,” the study stated.
“[Assault weapons] were rarely used in gun crimes even before the ban. [Large-capacity magazines] are involved in a more substantial share of gun crimes, but it is not clear how often the outcomes of gun attacks depend on the ability of offenders to fire more than ten shots (the current magazine capacity limit) without reloading.”
And then there was an independent 2017 study which, while still arguing for the efficacy of stronger gun control laws, found this: “Specific laws directed at firearm trafficking, improving child safety, or the banning of military-style assault weapons were not associated with changes in firearm homicide rates.”
So, no: What Jean-Pierre claimed happened literally never happened. But keep lying about these so-called “assault weapons.” Keep believing these “weapons of war” are to blame for what, at heart, are issues concerning mental health and cultural rot.
Rest assured that if the Biden administration got its wish — which it won’t, but let’s hypothesize away — there would be a new boogeyman when nothing happened. Semi-automatic handguns. Revolvers. The NRA. The Second Amendment.
And there will be lies about those, too. All because an uncritical media establishment is ever ready to believe those lies.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
