never trust the media about what anyone said

more adventures in the post truth era

in response to the school shooting in georgia, the media has exploded in another railroading of JD vance. it’s gross misinformation and misrepresentation. because all these people do is lie and the simple fact is that you should never trust a word they say about what anyone said without verifying it yourself.

we live in the age of unfettered access to primary sources and if you only ever learn about what people are saying based upon the accounts of those who hate them and wish them ill, you’re going to wind up with a badly skewed impression of a world that ain’t. it’s just flat out manipulation.

woodward and purrnstein

you cannot generate a sound world view by only hearing one side tell you about what all sides do and say.

one needs a more robust view and to hear all sides make their cases in earnest or one is assessing nothing, it’s just echo chamber bias confirmation.

and this is how one winds up knowing what isn’t so.

let’s look:

here’s gavin weighing in:

“school shootings are a fact of life”

“he’s shrugging his shoulders”

pretty damning. seems like JD wants us to accept the problem and that the problem has no solutions.

the harris/walz campaign jumped in too.

AP and NYT were right there to chime and and carry water.

the problem here is that it’s a lockstep barrage of falsity.

this is not what he said.

he never said “school shootings are a fact of life.”

it did not happen.

hear him in his own words:

"i don't like that this is a fact of life … but if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. and we have got to bolster security at our schools. we've got to bolster security so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children they're not able."

quite a different statement and sentiment, no?

this is not calling school shootings some inevitable fact of life, it’s saying that it’s a nasty fact of life that if you provide soft targets for psychos (and this shooter was likely trans/gender confused and was definitely known to FBI as a risk) they will go for them.

that said, there seems to be some sort of flash cut in that video and i’m a bit curious as to whether is has any impact on meaning.

that would also be worth knowing. anyone have a full unedited version?

but it’s pretty clear that his plan is to bolster security.

this does not seem like “shrugging shoulders” it seems like “seeking to do something.”

frankly, arming teachers is a good idea. i don’t think there has ever been a school shooting in school with armed staff. admittedly, there are far fewer such schools, so i’m not sure this is dipositive, but the evidence that legally armed citizens deter and stop mass shootings is actually quite strong and (predictably) this is an outcome the FBI seeks to purge from the data.

For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases that it identified in the ten years from 2014 to 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.

Overall, the CPRC estimates that law-abiding citizens with guns have stopped over 35 percent of active shootings over the last decade and 39.6 percent in the last five years. This figure is eight times higher than the four percent estimate made by the FBI.

as recent spate of EU stabbing sprees shows, there is no stopping a determined attacker apart from “ability to deter attack and defend oneself.”

police cannot be everywhere and gun free zones attract aggression. most of the highest gun crime regions of the US are cities with strict gun laws.

it’s obvious this does not work. security does.

so why misquote and malign JD?

it’s just partisan nastiness and the media is not seeking to expose it or play an even handed game, they’re weighing in, thumb on scale, and publishing things they know to be wrong. what, the NYT and AP could not watch the video?

those whose job is ostensibly to report the news are instead distorting it. they do not serve their readers, they serve the regime.

this is not an exception, it’s the rule.

and it’s just going to keep getting worse until no one listens anymore.