Important headlines for May 29th - The media & Hogg win and intellectual honesty dies
Bottom Line: These are stories you shouldn't miss and my takes on them...
Hot Take: Congrats to the Tampa Bay Times and the Sentinel network papers. They won. What they accomplished is chilling and its implications are alarming, but they were successful in what the initial mission was clearly initiated to be. Here's the quick walk back in time...
Two weeks ago, out of nowhere, the Tampa Bay Times and the Sentinel papers reported that over the course of three years over 74,000 chicken tender subs had been donated to Adam Putnam. Now, of course for almost that entire stretch he'd simply been Florida's Agriculture Commissioner, not a candidate for Govenor, but that was also conveniently left out of the reporting. Anyway, they figured out how to do math and determined that Publix had donated the equivalent of $670,000 with those subs. End of the reporting. They also managed to omit the fact that Publix had actually donated about 40% more to Democrats than Republicans in the 2018 election cycle but those facts weren't evidently relevant to the attempted hit on Putnam and Publix that was underway. Predictably left-wing organizations targeted Publix.
Publix first distanced itself from the NRA (how absurd is that to begin with...) and in-conjunction with David Hogg's illegal "die-in" protests caved and said they've frozen political donations. What's chilling about this is the successful campaign by major news outlets to exact this type of outcome and the message it now sends to the rest of political donors, especially companies, in Florida. If you donate to candidates we, the news media don't like, we'll potentially attempt to take you out. This coordinated hit job is Florida's version of the deep-state in Washington. And this really isn't about Adam Putnam (it is because he's the target of this), it's about all others going forward.
Guns Don't Kill People, But Gun Bans Do Justin Haskins, The Federalist
Excerpt: It is far more common for Americans to use guns to defend themselves or others against violence than to use guns to commit violence. Do those lives matter?
According to data from the Department of Justice, “In 2007–11, there were 235,700 victimizations where the victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender.” In another 103,000 instances, people used a firearm to defend their property against an offender.
That means over the five-year period from 2007 to 2011, there were more than 338,000 instances in which people defended themselves with a firearm, about 67,000 instances each year. Many researchers believe those figures are too low. A far-reaching survey conducted in the 1990s by Gary Kleck, a professor at Florida State University, found there are 2.1 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually.
Hot Take: This is a topic and information I've brought you readily over the past year recapping again as recently as last week. That this information is making its way to mainstream (albeit center-right in the case of the Federalist), is encouraging. Do the lives saved, the would-be victims who aren't victimized due to one's ability to use defensive force of a firearm, etc. Matter? They certainly do to those involved but to-date, not to most of the media or any of the activist groups that blame guns, rather than people, for murder. Isn't it ironic that if someone murders with bombs or vehicles it's the person that's to blame but if it's a gun that used it's the gun and the NRA that's to blame?
Until tomorrow...