The Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court rightly struck down a Trump-era gun control regulation last week. Now the fallout is utterly breaking the brains of partisans and ideologues in the legacy media.
There’s no better example of this phenomenon than NBC News correspondent Erin McLaughlin, whose coverage after the court’s decision has been so horrifically bad it should be shown in journalism courses under “what not to do.”
In a package for the Today Show on Monday morning, McLaughlin covered a spate of mass shootings from the past weekend. Bizarrely, she connected these shootings to the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down former President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban “bump stocks,” an accessory that helps someone fire a gun at a faster rate, via executive action.
“A mass shooting at a splash pad in Michigan, another at a Juneteenth celebration in Texas, and yet another at a gathering in Massachusetts, all just days after Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that rejects a ban on bump stocks,” she recounted.
She directly tied the ruling to the gory details of these shootings, referencing an 8-year-old boy who was shot in the head, and made this conflation not just once but repeatedly throughout the segment (full transcript from Newsbusters’s Nicholas Fondacaro here).
There’s just one big problem: These mass shootings have nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s decision. As McLaughlin admits at the end of the segment, “The shootings from over the weekend did not involve bump stocks to our knowledge.”
Excuse me?
That’s right: None of the shootings involved the use of bump stocks. (Oh, and Massachusetts already bans bump stocks under state law, which is unaffected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.)
So why tie these stories together at all, then, if they have absolutely no connection?
We all know why: It’s a blatant attempt by legacy media to tug at the heartstrings of good people and exploit these tragedies to undermine a ruling that ideologically motivated “neutral journalists” dislike and, more broadly, discredit the Supreme Court because they disagree with its majority.
It’s journalistic malpractice that serves only to scare viewers needlessly and make them feel that the Supreme Court ruling somehow has endangered the public. It hasn’t. Bump stocks are rarely used in mass shootings. That was true before the ban and it’s still true now.
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Regardless, a similar effect as a bump stock can be achieved with a rubber band with a basic technique that anyone can learn from a 10-minute YouTube video. So, the ban being in place or not makes no difference to public safety and certainly has no bearing on recent mass shootings.
But hey, what are those pesky facts when there’s fear to sell and a narrative to spread?
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is an independent journalist, YouTuber, and co-founder of BASEDPolitics.