Fact check? The Washington Post Fails Again

It’s embarrassing how shamelessly the Washington Post is shilling for Hillary Clinton nowadays.

[Recently], the Post’s “fact-checker,” Glenn Kessler, said that the NRA's new TV ad is wrong, in claiming that Clinton “doesn’t believe in your right to keep a gun at home for self-defense.”

Kessler took his shot at the NRA after we outlined how the Post’s editors were disingenuous, at best, in their attempt to fool the public into believing that Clinton is anything but a staunch gun control extremist.

Kessler’s reasoning wasn’t just dubious, it was devoid of merit. On the one hand, he acknowledged that NRA’s ad is based upon Clinton’s statement that the Supreme Court is “wrong on the Second Amendment” and he admitted that Clinton indeed spoke those words. He even agreed that Clinton might, if elected president, nominate Supreme Court justices who would vote to overturn Heller.

Strangely, Kessler said NRA’s ad is wrong because Clinton supports an “assault weapons” ban, opposes the open carrying of long guns, supports expanding firearm-related background checks, wants more categories of people to be prohibited from possessing firearms, and wants to repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (which, Kessler, like Clinton, falsely claims protects negligent members of the gun industry).

But, Kessler says, “None of these proposals would restrict a person from buying a gun to keep at home for self-defense.”

So his argument is that Clinton surely wants more gun control, but not that kind of gun control.

But that is an absurd argument. The fact that Clinton supports lots of gun control restrictions doesn’t prove, one way or the other, whether she believes people have the right to have handguns at home for self-defense, or what she means when she says the Supreme Court is “wrong on the Second Amendment.”

Kessler’s and the Post’s phony-baloney, dishonest dispute about Clinton’s stance on those issues could be laid to rest, once and for all, if the Post or someone else in the media would ask Clinton to state precisely how she thinks the Supreme Court is “wrong on the Second Amendment.”

Clinton might say that she has already answered this question. Politifact has reported, “The Clinton campaign previously told us Clinton ‘believes Heller was wrongly decided in that cities and states should have the power to craft common sense laws to keep their residents safe.’”

However, that’s not a legitimate answer. Heller wasn’t concerned with whether states and cities could impose various gun control restrictions. In fact, the Court addressed this question directly, by stating, “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Once again, let’s be clear about this, because Clinton will continue to shift, duck, dive, and slide around the issue for the remainder of the campaign. As is her well-worn pattern, she will refuse to be as honest with the voters as she was to big donors at her swanky fundraiser where her “wrong” comment was recorded.

What Heller was concerned with, and all nine justices said so, was whether the Second Amendment protects the right to have a handgun at home for protection. The majority opinion said, “We consider whether a District of Columbia prohibition on the possession of usable handguns in the home violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution” and concluded, “In sum, we hold that the District’s ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”

Not only that, the four dissenting justices said that the case was concerned with “whether a District of Columbia law that prohibits the possession of handguns in the home violates the Second Amendment.”

So, if the Court was “wrong,” it was “wrong” about keeping a gun at home for self-defense, not “wrong” because of anything else Clinton wants to suggest is a “reasonable” or “common sense” restriction.

Kessler and the Post know all of this. Simply put, Clinton will say anything to get elected and the Post will say anything to help her do so.

It’s no wonder that a Pew poll from July found that 74 percent of Americans believe that the media are biased in their reporting. How soon the other 26 percent figure out the obvious is anyone’s guess, but we’re confident Kessler and his colleagues at the Washington Post will continue to chip away at the stubborn few.

© 2016 National Rifle Association of America, Institute for Legislative Action. This may be reproduced. This may not be reproduced for commercial purposes.