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September 15, 2017
Rolling Stone Gathers No Credibility
There are many who believe that for a variety of reasons Rolling Stone stopped being worth reading at about the time its staff writers turned in their IBM Selectric typewriters for first-generation cathode-ray tube computer monitors sometime in the 1980s. I can see why.
Along the way, along with the music reviews and entertainment news, the publication has become reliably anti-gun, unable to report accurately, let alone fairly, on anything to do with firearms. Rolling Stone has been proudly on the political low road to more gun control hitting its latest milestone just this week with “Congressional Baseball Shooting Looms Large over Gun-Silencer Hearing.” Well, the hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources was on the latest version of the SHARE Act, to which Hearing Protection Act (HPA) provisions were added, but the anti-gun game was on and this was the only game in town.
Hyperbolic and hoplophobic (fear of guns) headlines and the hysterical editorial copy that falls underneath are nothing new for Rolling Stone, which has previously plastered its website with “How the NRA paved the way for the Orlando Shooting” and “Why It’s Time to Repeal the Second Amendment.”
So, the slanted reporting of this week came as no surprise, nor did the unquestioned acceptance of the Congressional committee testimony from the “… political advisor with Americans for Responsible Solutions – the gun control group founded by former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords …” We will score Rolling Stone writer Matt Laslo one point for accuracy in that identification of David Chipman. For those keeping score at home, however, it’s mostly downhill from here for this Rolling Stone reportage.
Witness Chipman claimed that the rifle fire directed at the Members of Congress and their staff during baseball practice in Alexandria on that awful day this past Spring would not have been readily identifiable if that firearm had been suppressor-equipped, presenting the argument the Giffords group likes to use in opposing the Hearing Protection Act that the sound of gunfire alerts people to “take cover” and therefore saves lives. That testimony was immediately disputed by Congressman Steve Pearce who was at that practice and pointed out that it was the return fire from Capitol Hill police that saved lives that day.
Laslo steps into his own reporting to note that Chipman (as a former ATF agent) “… knows what silencers are meant to do: disperse the sound from weapons so there isn’t as loud of a bang when the trigger is pulled.” Wait, what? Isn’t any form of the word “disperse” pretty much the opposite of any form of the word “suppress” or even his preferred “silence(er)?” No matter, accuracy is no virtue in the pursuit of political narrative.
The over-the-top story goes on to report testimony that should the current federal over-regulation of suppressors be reduced to exactly the level of regulation as the firearms to which they would be attached will create a “new, dangerous marketplace that the nation doesn’t need” with “trafficking channels going to those states that chose today to actually ban silencers.” Unreported, of course, is that 42 states today allow for the legal ownership of suppressors and 40 allow them for hunting. Suppressors are legal and widely used in most of Europe, in some places legally required. We have no reports of their widespread trafficking there. It’s nonsense.
You get the picture. Rolling Stone is picking up speed as it careens ever down-hill in its political pursuit of supporting more gun control. It gathers no credibility as it goes.
Categories: Featured, Government Relations, Top Stories
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