David McElroy

I was out getting my mail one day not long ago when I noticed several of my neighbors in the street talking. I stepped across the street to be neighborly and see what the neighborhood gossip might be.

“Hey, let me tell you about the new idea we’ve been talking about,” said Karl. He’s sort of the intellectual in our neighborhood. I’m not sure what he does, but he spends a lot of time at the library working on a book. “We’ve decided that we need a neighborhood swimming pool for our street. I figure we can have it ready to go by the time it’s warm enough next spring.”

“Sounds great, Karl,” I said, “but wouldn’t that be pretty expensive?”

“None of us can afford it alone,” Karl said, “but if we put our resources together, it shouldn’t be so bad.”

The other folks all seemed to think it was a good idea, so I told him I might be interested if the price was right. They told me they’d let me know what they figured out, and I went back home.

A few days later, there was a knock at my door. It was Karl and a couple of his friends.

“I have great news,” Karl said. “We took a vote and decided to move ahead with the community swimming pool project. We’ll be letting you know how much you owe as soon as we have the figures all put together. Isn’t that great?”

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Do journalists have more rights than you do? Do you even know for sure what makes someone a journalist? And does the U.S. government have any business defining who’s a journalist and who’s not?

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has just inserted language into a bill that would limit who gets privileges as a journalist under the First Amendment. It would declare that those who get paid to report on the news are journalists, but those who don’t get paid for it aren’t journalists. She thinks that being a journalist is a special privilege (video). Under her rules, bloggers and “citizen journalists” aren’t journalists at all. This is wrong for journalism. It’s wrong for the law. But most importantly, it’s wrong for the average American.

How did we get to this point? Is Feinstein just an evil fascist, as Matt Drudge suggested about her on this issue? I don’t think so. She’s wrong, but it helps to understand what the underlying issues are.

In this country, we have freedom of the press because it’s mentioned in the First Amendment to the Constitution. (I’m not even going to get into the fact that we should have the right even without it being mentioned, because the government is given no power to taken that freedom away. I’m ignoring that because dealing with what the Constitution originally meant has nothing to do with how the law currently works here.) Because the First Amendment specifically says that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…,” the media in this country have traditionally enjoyed a wide degree of freedom.

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Is there anything more predictable than people using a hot news story to promote whatever political agenda they wanted to push anyway?

The tragic shooting at the Washington Navy Yard Monday is the latest example of this ugly partisan tendency. The bodies weren’t even cold before progressives started calling for more gun control. I started seeing calls for gun control on Facebook from progressives while the story was still being sorted out. Nobody knew whether there was one shooter or up to three of them, but lack of facts about what happened didn’t stop people from turning to their political agendas.

The news media can almost always be counted on to get something egregiously wrong in a story about guns. CNN provided the shocking moment of ignorance Monday when it referred to the weapon used as an “AR15 shotgun.” The AR-15 is one of the “assault weapons” that media frequently use to demonize guns of all sort, but it wasn’t even used in this shooting. It’s a specific type of weapon — and it’s not a shotgun — but that mention is enough to subtly embed fear of such a weapon into those who might have seen the graphic on the screen. Was it an accident? Yes. Was it inexcusable ignorance by people who don’t have a clue about guns? Yes.

For his part, Barack Obama quickly launched into a call for more gun control. (Oddly, he didn’t say anything about how this black shooter might look something like his son, if he had a son.) The gunman used a shotgun that he bought legally, because there was nothing about him that would have flagged him for the sort of background checks that progressives keep claiming will stop shootings. That didn’t stop Obama from pretending that his existing agenda would have stopped the shooting.

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