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What you don't know can hurt
you!
by Robert A. Waters
In 1998, after my book, The
Best Defense: True Stories of Intended Victims Who Defended Themselves with a
Firearm, was published, I was contacted by a well-known reporter from
CBS News. She stated that she'd read the book and asked me to put her in touch
with a female victim who had used a gun in self-defense. (I quickly learned that
reporters only want to interview women defenders, not men.) She was making a
documentary about guns, she said, and wanted to make sure it was balanced.
Then she hesitated. I could tell that something was weighing on her mind.
Finally, she blurted, "Do people really use guns for
self-protection?" I was stunned. Even after having read the twenty
documented cases of self-defense described in my book, this woman was skeptical.
During the next few days, we had several conversations, and each time she
expressed surprise that guns were actually used to protect lives.
Her cynicism was later echoed in conversations with reporters from each major
network and from several major newspapers.
In the two-and-a-half years since the publication of my book, I've learned that
those who work in the mainstream media are ignorant about the positive use of
guns. It is this ignorance that fuels their anti-gun sentiment and keeps the
stream of pro-gun control television shows and newspaper articles flowing.
Why don't they know anything about guns?
Surveys have shown that most reporters who work for the major media outlets live
in upper-class homes, far above those of us in fly-over country. Many took their
education at Ivy League universities where they protested the Vietnam conflict,
smoked dope, loved freely, and ingested every ultra-liberal cause their
professors threw at them.
Once they graduated, they faced the prospect of going to work. What better way
to earn a fat paycheck and change the world than to become a reporter for ABC,
or CBS, or NBC, or CNN, or to write for the New York Times, the Washington Post,
or some other major newspaper?
Having become gainfully employed, these men and women from Yale and Harvard and
Brown and Princeton brought their own biases with them. Many do not know anyone
who owns guns. Their only exposure to firearms comes when they report on the
carnage left by a deranged shooter gone postal, or a gang member who blasts his
rivals into the turf, or the occasional accidental shooting of a child.
A few months ago, a columnist for the Detroit News wrote that she didn't know
anyone who had ever used a gun for self-defense. Not only did she not know
anyone personally, she wrote, she'd never even heard of such a case. The
implication, of course, was that if no one uses guns for self-protection, then
there is no need for the evil things. After her article appeared, pro-gun
advocates swamped the columnist with hundreds of newspaper clippings and
personal stories of self-defense. (Even though she did not change her mind about
gun control, she had enough integrity to publish several of those accounts and
to recant some of her false statements.)
But this illustrates the mind-set we're up against.
Most of these reporters have never lived on a farm or a ranch where guns are a
necessity. They've never slept a single night in the projects where drug dealers
roam unmolested, where rape and murder are common-place, and where guns are a
vital means of self-protection. They've never had a former spouse stalk them and
attack them with murderous fury. They've never had to work sixteen hours a day
at a blue-collar job just to have some punk rob them and take the money they've
set aside to make the next house payment.
They've never been personally subjected to the reality of violence.
Instead, many reporters still long for the sixties, when communism was good and
capitalism was evil. And that's the rub--to them, all issues are black and
white, including the gun issue. Since it is self-evident that guns are bad, they
think, we must do away with the tools of destruction. Then Utopia will
materialize and we'll all be safe and happy.
It is in this context that we have to find a way to instill in their minds the
fact that guns are used for positive
purposes more often than they're used to slaughter innocent babies.
We have to show them that the concealed carry laws passed by thirty-two states
are among the most successful statutes ever passed, with a success rate in the
99.999 percentile. (Ask yourself what other law can make that claim.)
We have to figure out a way to teach them the history that their professors
refused to teach, the history of how this country became free because of
minutemen and patriots who used their own firearms to defeat the British. We
have to explain to them what seems so obvious to us: how Hitler and Stalin and
Castro and Pol Pot and other twentieth-century tyrants confiscated all
privately-owned guns before enslaving the masses.
And, perhaps most importantly, we have to show them the faces of the thousands
of innocent victims who are alive today because they had guns available when
they were attacked. We must get them to listen to those poignant voices filled
with the exhilaration and wonder of being alive. We must break through ignorance
and prejudice to get these voices heard--if published consistently by the
mainstream media, they would quickly change the debate.
The reporter from CBS completed her hour-long documentary about gun control. She
did a re-enactment with one of the victims I recommended. And she attempted to
be fair. But given her own biases, the film inevitably ended up as a puff piece
for gun control.
Which brings us back to the title of this article. If the public never hears
about real-life accounts of armed self-defense, they can't know about them. And
if they don't know, they can't make informed decisions about guns. And they will
continue to fall for the lies told by gun control advocates.
In Proverbs, the poet writes, "For a lack of vision, the people
perish." Vision is obtained through knowledge.
It is up to those of us who know the truth to persuade influential members of
the media to report the facts.
We have our work cut out for us.
Also from Robert Waters
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