Gun rights advocates continue to face an uphill battle when it comes to misinformation about firearms being spread through the media.
A recent Washington Post editorial reported on a national study saying 4.2 percent of American kids have witnessed a shooting in the past year. The actual question however, referred to children who witnessed violence of any kind.
“Every time it was recycled by a news organization it got this more and more anti-gun tilt to it,” says T. Edwin Walker at Texas Laws Shield who conversely points out how fast the congressional baseball shooting disappeared from headlines.
“There was nobody who immediately came out and said we want more gun control, gun control would have prevented this, because the background of that shooting did not fit into their narrative,” he says.
Walker argues two-thirds of gun deaths in America are suicides.
“There is three one-thousandths of a percent of people in the United States who are killed by a firearm, and they're not killed by themselves,” he says. “Now that does not take into account accidents or justified shootings, so the number of actual homicides is much lower.”