Judging from Post editor Sally Buzbee’s introduction to the project, as well as from my own reporting, the paper talked to dozens of survivors and family members and weighed the enormous range of their opinions about this issue to craft the feature. It was so much better than I was expecting that it initially blinded me to the way it was bad. But bad in a kind of routine way: The media, as well as certain kinds of activists, believe we need to be presented with graphic, grisly evidence to grasp what are simply facts. This grisly evidence, they posit, will change hearts and minds.
It will not. Upwards of three-quarters of American voters support almost every commonsense gun law. And we know why political leaders haven’t heeded their call: the gun lobby, and its disgusting political servants. But the Post tried, anyway, with its multimedia “Terror on Repeat” project. I won’t impugn these journalists’ motives. I’ll assume they are good. I’ll just tell you what I saw, and why I would like to spare people seeing the same thing. Especially survivors.
Except the answer is not “no,” there are a number of factors that suggest assault rifles – even ones marked for civilian use – are inflating those numbers. It could be psychological, it could be practical, it could be a number of things, but the points of correlation are too frequent and too strong to be ignored. Saying otherwise is to make yourself a liar.
Okay, so, next time, maybe post a source that says that when claiming “the facts disagree with you”, instead of one that directly contradicts your point?