Pro-capping
the News
Ya gotta interpret
and report with your slant.
by Angel Shamaya
Director, KeepAndBearArms.com
Many news items that hit the press have in them
the seeds of victory. This past weekend, I was given a few minutes to address a
group at the Second Amendment Foundation's fantastic Gun Rights Policy
Conference, and one thing I urged people to do was to alter anti-gun or neutral news to
give it a
pro-self-defense slant before reporting it to people within their spheres of
influence.
That's what I do. For example...
In one report on the web today, we see a
headline that says, "Gun
Related Expulsions Down." In this news report, we are told that
"A report issued by the Education
Department showed there were 3,523 expulsions of weapon-toting students in the
50 states, the District of Columbia and four U.S. territories in the 1998-99
school year. That figure is down 4 percent from 3,658 the previous school
year. Some 46.6 million students attend U.S. public schools from kindergarten
to 12th grade."
I like when they give us raw data. From their
numbers, my take on this report follows:
"7/1000ths of one percent of
students in the entire nation and the governed federal territories were expelled for weapons in the 1998-1999
school year. Considering just how many gun owning families there are, this is
quite a low number, actually. We should be happy that, by and large, our
students are not turning to crime even though the Hollywood media is
glorifying violence at every turn. The fact that 99.993% of our students
are behaving so peacefully is truly invigorating, and we look forward to
seeing that profoundly high number increase through means that both attack
criminal activity while preserving the rights of free citizens."
Then there is the story about UK criminals using
poisonous snakes to frighten subjects (can't quite call them citizens, can
we?) into handing over their money.
But I guess we don't really need to rewrite
that one. The UK folks have been handing pro-self-defense people in America
plenty of ammo to support our cause, pretty much on a daily basis. Let's
just be glad we don't have to use snakes to defend our homes and our lives. One
can't help but wonder why the subjects in the UK have accepted such a fate, but
I guess that is what they wanted for themselves and their society.
My primary reason for writing this brief note
is to ask for people with a knack for writing and reporting to start culling the
news and putting a pro-self-defense, pro-liberty, pro-RKBA, positive slant on
what you find in the media. We will publish even short
"reframing" articles where you turn an article upside down to get the
positive side of the event known. It's time that we begin to take every
anti-self-defense article apart at the seams and present it how we see
it.
Stick your articles right
here.