Month: May 2018

President Donald J. Trump announced his decision to demand an official investigation of former President Barack Obama’s administration on Sunday for infiltrating or surveilling his presidential campaign for political reasons.

“I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday afternoon.

Trump frequently blames investigations of his campaign on Obama, suggesting that politically motivated investigators were unfairly targeting his campaign.

He spent most of Sunday morning sharing his thoughts on Twitter about the ongoing Russia investigation, suggesting that the ongoing “witch hunt” was out of control. “Things are really getting ridiculous,” Trump wrote, noting that so far there was no collusion found by special investigators.

He criticized Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team as “13 Angry and heavily conflicted Democrats” who were part of the Obama administration.

“STOP!” he wrote. “They have found no collusion with Russia, No obstruction.”

Trump again redirected the continuing investigation towards failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Democrats, Tony Podesta, the DNC, and politically biased FBI officials.

“Republicans and real Americans should start getting tough on this Scam,” he wrote.

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 20, 2018

 

 

Before you can work on solving any problem, you need accurate information. You need the truth.

This is evident everywhere: A carpenter can’t fix a table if the measurements he’s given are wrong or his tape measure is inaccurate. A pilot can’t land a plane if all the instruments have been tampered with, and show dangerously incorrect readings for altitude and speed. Truth and accuracy matter — and the more important the problem, the more vital this is.

It seems CNN, however, hasn’t gotten the memo. In the wake of the tragic school shooting in Texas, the left-leaning news network seemed to put a narrative ahead of everything else.

During its coverage of the crime, CNN repeated gun violence statistics, but inflated the definition of “school shootings” to make them seem wildly more common than they are.

“There has been, on average, 1 school shooting every week this year,” the outlet declared in a headline on Friday.

“We’re only 20 weeks into 2018, and there have already been 22 school shootings where someone was hurt or killed,” CNN continued. “That averages out to more than 1 shooting a week.”

That’s a lot — especially when you imagine each of those incidents being equivalent to the shocking attacks in Parkland, Florida, or Santa Fe, Texas.

But there’s a problem: Those numbers are exaggerated, purposely padded to give a false impression of a mass-shooting crime wave that doesn’t exist.

That’s exactly what journalist Tiffany Craig at KHOU11 News in Houston brilliantly pointed out over the weekend. Breaking down the Texas incident and related claims, she separated the facts from fiction and exaggeration … or as we used to call it, did actual journalism.

Updated and #verified info on #SantaFeHighschool shooting #khou11 #tegna @tegna #verify pic.twitter.com/aKuIoPJMyA

— Tiffany KHOU ????????? (@TiffanyKHOU) May 18, 2018

“Social media has been abuzz today with this,” Craig said. “The first one is this information that there were 18 school shootings in 2018. This number, 18, is not mass shootings like what you’re seeing today here in Santa Fe.”

The keen reporter pointed out something that the mainstream media seems eager to hide: Numbers are being padded to include situations that no reasonable person would call a “school shooting” in the common sense.

“These include smaller incidents that might be around the school or even suicides, and all of those numbers get pooled together and they’re presented in a way like this that instills fear in some people,” she explained. “So this is a false piece of information, and we want to let you know that.”

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She’s 100 percent correct. Sure enough, a closer look at CNN’s article reveals that they’re counting things that may be crimes, but — at best — stretch the definition of a school shooting.

One “shooting” counted by the news channel, for example, involved one student shooting another … with a toy BB gun. Nobody was seriously hurt.

Another incident included by CNN to arrive at its numbers was an accidental discharge of a firearm during a public safety class. Preventable? Yes, but not really a “school shooting.”

A 32-year-old man shot in a parking lot during a dispute after school hours. A possibly gang-related shooting of an adult at a house party near a university.

You get the idea.

These are the same number-padding tactics used by the liberal lobbying group Everytown for Gun Safety. As The Western Journal has previously noted, outlets choose a vague definition of “school shootings” and pile any possible incident into the category to come up with a shockingly high number.

It may not be outright lying, but it’s almost certainly deceptive.

By the same token, “assault rifles” and “semi-automatic weapons” are still the buzzwords of the day, despite the fact that neither of those were used by the Texas criminal.

That raises a question that Americans should carefully consider: Why do left-leaning groups need to exaggerate facts and pad numbers to push their agenda?

The answer is that despite dramatic headline-making incidents, America’s school children are safer in classrooms than they are riding their bikes or walking down the road … and there’s no dangerous correlation between gun sales and crime rates.

Crimes like the Santa Fe shooting are tragic, but they’re also statistically rare — and infringing on the rights of law-abiding citizens isn’t the answer to stopping them.

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In the wake of a national tragedy involving guns, it’s a pitiful synonym of where we are as a nation that one can almost set their watch by how quickly a Democrat makes a grotesquely misinformed statement about guns that somehow doesn’t get called out by the mainstream media.

Most of these statements call for stricter gun laws — not any specific type of gun law, mind you, but just a general call for gun laws. There is a list of usual suspects in these sorts of things: Andrew Cuomo, Dianne Feinstein, Kirsten Gillibrand.

However, the biscuit-taker in the race to the bottom after the Santa Fe shooting was somewhat of a surprise: Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy.

I’m not surprised that he said something cretinously liberal and blatantly unconstitutional, mind you; he comes from a state bluer than Violet Beauregarde after she decided to disregard some sage advice regarding experimental chewing gum and hasn’t evinced a history of bucking the wishes of his voters.

I’m surprised because a) not a whole lot of people knew who this perpetual backbencher was before Friday and b) what he said was so jaw-droppingly unconstitutional and erroneous that someone in his office should have informed him of the pain he was about to reap before he pushed the send button.

Here’s Murphy’s tweet:

Let’s call it like it is: the horrifying inaction of Congress, slaughter after slaughter, has become a green light to would-be shooters, who pervert silence into endorsement.

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) May 18, 2018

“Let’s call it like it is: the horrifying inaction of Congress, slaughter after slaughter, has become a green light to would-be shooters, who pervert silence into endorsement,” he wrote.

Now, a few things here. First, as National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke pointed out, Murphy has said that he has no intention of trying to ban shotguns or .38 revolvers in the gun legislation he is pushing in Congress. (In fact, the right to own those weapons has been affirmed by District of Columbia v. Heller, the most pertinent recent Supreme Court case regarding gun control.) Is Congress showing inaction by refusing to pass laws that are unconstitutional on their face — not to mention one that Murphy says he wouldn’t support?

Or perhaps they’re showing inaction on the national background check system, which Murphy has (very ostentatiously) said needs to be strengthened. His website says that he favors “universal background checks, cracking down on straw purchasers and illegal weapon sales, and limiting access to high-capacity magazines and military-style assault weapons.”

He also wants “legislation to close loopholes in our background check system; to make it illegal for those on the FBI terror watch list to buy a gun; to end the ban on gun violence research at the Center for Disease Control; to encourage licensing requirements for handgun purchases; and to help keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers.”

First, let me just remind everyone that Murphy has been in the Senate since 2013 but has never seemed particularly concerned about straw purchasers and illegal weapons sales when they were approved by the Obama administration as part of Operation Fast and Furious. Second, none of the weapons used had “high-capacity magazines” or were “military-style assault weapons.”

And, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions is leading a thorough review of the background check system, changes to it are unlikely to have accomplished anything in this instance. Neither the shooter nor his father had any contact with law enforcement or public health officials that would have disqualified them from gun ownership.

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So, where’s the “horrifying inaction?” How is the “pervert(ed) silence” of the GOP giving a “green light to would-be shooters?”

There are two potential reasons Cooke gives for Murphy’s 280-character rage-a-thon. The first is that he’s simply another soapbox hustler who screams at the top of his lungs to do something whenever a tragedy like this occurs so that he has a good quote or video clip to send out in the next fundraising email. The second option — which is scarier and (I think) much more likely — is that Murphy actually wants pistols and shotguns banned, along with pretty much every other firearm.

Even though gun violence has gone down as gun ownership has gone up, the Democrats have become far more brazen in their belief that the only solution to a barely existent problem is to take away all of America’s guns. Never mind the fact that targeted, hyper-narrow regulations and changing the way the mainstream media covers mass shootings like these would likely yield greater results.

We’ve come to the point where Democrat representatives are openly talking about seizing all modern sporting rifles — or “assault weapons,” in the parlance of the left — and “buy(ing) back such weapons from all who choose to abide by the law, and we should criminally prosecute any who choose to defy it by keeping their weapons.”

By his language in the Friday tweet, Murphy has made it clear that hsi agenda doesn’t stop with rifles. It’s going to extend to shotguns, pistols — really, anything covered by the Second Amendment. The only thing being perverted here is the Constitution, and Chris Murphy knows it.

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