The Mainstream Media Hides Gun Owners

By Rob Morse

Louisiana- (Ammoland.com)  The mainstream media hides gun owners.  That isn’t an accident, any more than it is an accident that some news reporters look like fashion models.

What do gun owners look like, and why does it matter?  Part of the progressive playbook is to make the rights of gun-owners appear inconsequential and not worth defending.  To do that, gun owners in the United States have to be seen as different than the general public.  Democrat politicians and the democrat media have to make us think politicians are disarming somebody else, disarming them .. rather than disarming us.  They have to alienate gun owners before the politician’s take our rights with their phone and their pen.  Gun owners have to first be repackaged and redefined before they are disarmed.  Gun owners have to be sold as abhorrent, extremist and ugly.  That is a marketing job.

Look at people who make a living selling things.  We want to believe beautiful people.  That is why media broadcasters look like fashion models.  Our prejudices go farther than that.  We want to believe our enemy is both wrong and ugly so we can mistreat them without guilt.  That is why the mainstream media distorts the image of gun owners.  That is why the media invites ugly old men to defend the right of armed self-defense.

Gun owners are portrayed as angry white men.  Gun owners are portrayed as elitists rather than as populists.  The mainstream news deliberately ignores young women who have chosen to own and carry guns for self-defense.  The media ignores minorities and the poor who choose to own a gun to protect their family.  The media sells us the violence committed with a gun rather than reporting on the lives saved with a firearm.  You’re left with a distorted view of the world if you only get your news glancing at the mainstream news.

In fact, gun owners look like us.  Depending on the survey you quote, between 34 percent and 47 percent of us say we have a gun in our home.  The truth lies between a third and a half.  Both men and women own guns, with gun ownership weighted towards men by a ratio of 55 percent to 45 percent.  That is consistent with four-out-of-ten NRA members being women.
Whites are over-represented as gun owners by three percentage points and blacks are underrepresented by one percent.  That survey is at odds with the activities of minorities in the National Rifle Association.  Evidently minority gun owners are slightly more likely to join the NRA and donate than white gun owners.  The average NRA donor is between 40 to 45 years old.

Gun owners are like us.  They have the same rights we do.

In contrast, the mainstream media is remarkably uniform.  We can count on one hand the number of mainstream news media who own guns.  When it comes to reporting on guns in society, be it violent crime or upcoming gun laws, the media is reporting on a segment of America they don’t represent or understand.  If the media looked like us, then between a third and a half of the people working in the news rooms should own a gun.  They don’t, and that is odd given how much the democrat media champions diversity.

It isn’t for lack of material.  There are scores of young, articulate and attractive men and women who own guns and can represent gun owners.  The media wants to pretend they don’t exist.

The democrat media is more comfortable interviewing attractive people who agree with them.

Now that is ugly.

-Image from the Muppets- Statler & Waldorf
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Rob Morse: Rob writes about gun rights at Ammoland, at Clash Daily and on his SlowFacts blog. He co-hosts the Polite Society Podcast. He is also an NRA pistol instructor and combat handgun competitor.