Category Archives: anti guns

The US, the BBC, and Guns: Bias? What Bias? Agenda? What Agenda?

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Mardell just can’t help himself. He made a video report from just outside the Washington Navy Yard yesterday, featuring interviews BBC freelancers collected from a couple of the mass murderer’s friends, as well as his own analysis.

Mardell said that mass murder of this kind is now “as American as baseball.” Isn’t that charming? He wouldn’t dare say that child rape or honor killings or beheadings were as Islamic as a prayer rug. The BBC’s editorial double standards are clear.

Most people here will recall the not-so-prescient words of the BBC’s top man in the US the last time there was a mass shooting on a US military base:

The truth is of course cloudy. The alleged murderer was clearly a Muslim, but there is very little to suggest that he adhered to a hard-line interpretation of his religion or that he had political or religious motives.

And he closed with this classic:

Still, searching for patterns and for answers is part of what it is to be human. I loathe cliche, but perhaps, for once, this is a “senseless tragedy”, devoid of deeper meaning.

Mardell wrote these words even after it was known that Maj. Hassan shouted what the BBC has watered down to “an Islamic benediction”, and news of his jihadi leanings was coming out. In other words, his personal belief system – and an agenda to stamp down any possible unapproved thoughts – caused him not only to ignore facts, but to push what he must have known was a questionable Narrative.

This time around, because there’s a different agenda – the anti-gun movement – no way is he suggesting this was a senseless tragedy – even though it clearly was – because he and the BBC want to push it. He admitted he was asked to do this in his previous piece, so we know it’s not just him, and is acceptable practice in the BBC newsroom. It’s almost as if Mardell’s saying, “Don’t blame me for this sickening display: I’m only doing what London asked.” I’m not generous enough to give him the benefit of the doubt, I’m afraid, as he has form. This time around, the tragedy can be used to push an agenda of which he approves, so off he goes.

That’s fine, some may say, because it’s only natural that people will question what some see as the US free-for-all when it comes to weapons of mass murder when this kind of thing keeps happening with the regularity of the phases of the moon. Well, in this case, the leap to push that agenda was based on false reports, even though world-class, experienced professional journalists know all too well that all kinds of crazy stuff gets reported in the early hours of these tragedies. It’s human to speculate wildly, and opinion writers and pundits – as well as titled BBC editors and silly bloggers on obscure websites which nobody reads – can do so as much as they like, since opinion is their job, not reporting of facts. Yet the line is blurred at the BBC. People whose job includes giving opinion also do reporting, and it’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. In this case, facts were already decided upon, and the agenda was ordered. (My own local paper, the NY Daily News, is equally guilty of this sickness, and the writer I think I dislike most wrote the idiotic cover article. The steep decline of this paper since a News of the World/NY Post guy took over is a topic for another rant. And it’s not even owned by evil Uncle Rupert. But at least it’s not my official state broadcaster with a legacy of trust and deep cultural connection spanning generations, and I don’t have to pay for it if I don’t want to.)

Now once again Mardell is talking out of his own agenda even after facts are known to render it baseless. By the time this video was finished, news was already coming out that there was no AR-15 involved. It’s pretty hard to shrug this off as the understandable result of the fog of confusion common in the first few hours after this kind of incident. Not only that, but the murderer’s primary weapon was not the shotgun he brought, but guns he took from within the premises. The gun-control argument was rendered irrelevant, yet Mardell pushes it anyway.

Even here he closes with a sigh (my inference, yeah) that this tragedy won’t push the gun-control debate in the desired direction. If he didn’t think it needed changing in a stricter direction, why ask the question he asked? If he was impartial – or the BBC actually cared about impartiality on pet issues – he would have stopped asking about gun control laws once it was known to him that banning assault weapons wouldn’t have prevented this. All Alexis had on him when he walked in the door was a shotgun. Even British subjects are allowed to own shotguns, so nobody can claim cultural superiority here. Anyone insisting that stricter US gun laws would have prevented this must by definition be demanding even more draconian laws than the UK has. Any takers?

Mardell reports the killer had a checkered past that should have raised red flags. How many times have we heard this now? Sandy Hook, Colorado, Ft. Hood, the DC sniper of some years back. One could make the case that most or all the newsworthy multiple murders by AR-15 last year were done by people who would qualify as mentally ill in some way. It’s becoming, as the sage said, as American as baseball.

In spite of this, Mardell is worried about gun control laws which have absolutely nothing to do with this tragedy instead of what he knows is a systemic failure to keep seriously mentally ill people out of trouble. He knows this is the real problem. He brings it up himself in both the published article and this video report. It’s a big, big problem. I dare say it’s hard not to have developed even a tiny bit of pity or sympathy for the poor bastard who seems to have been a decent sort who just went mad. And now yet more families are hurt and diminished, lives cut short, hearts broken, because of a broken system. But not the one with which the BBC is obsessed.

Yet in his text piece he blamed lax gun control laws for the police deciding not to prosecute Alexis for shooting somebody’s tires and for firing a gun into a ceiling. Gun control laws aren’t relevant to those incidents either, but Mardell either doesn’t understand that or doesn’t care to.

The Ft. Hood murders were not a “senseless tragedy”, yet Mardell speculated that they were, because he had an agenda on his mind. This time it really was a senseless tragedy, but he’s not speculating that it was one and instead is finding a reason for it, because he has an agenda on his mind. Gosh, it’s a shame this tragedy can’t be exploited to change the debate, isn’t it? If that’s not on Mardell’s mind when he wrote and said this stuff, why did he keep saying it? Who other than anti-gun people have this perspective?

Mardell says that this tragedy will not change the debate about stricter gun laws, but gives the wrong reason for it. He said in his printed piece that US culture needs to change first. In fact – and he knew this by the time he made this video report – the reason it won’t change the debate is because it’s irrelevant. No assault weapon was involved, and the only weapon the killer brought to the party was one even BBC employees in Salford could own.

There is no other explanation for what he’s done. His judgment is clouded. And it’s not just Mardell.

More Guns or More Propaganda?

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This latest “bespoke” video magazine feature in the BBC’s “Altered States”* series really appears on the surface to be not only a balanced presentation on gun rights and laws, but could actually be interpreted by people not paying attention as being biased in favor of gun advocates. It isn’t, but it’s very cleverly disguised.

Would more guns save more American lives?

Remember the choice of “more” and “more” in this title for later. First, let me point out that this video piece was put together without BBC influence or prompting. It was made by Charles Ledford, who recently became Associate Professor of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He seems to be a recent hire, as he only finished his MA less than two years ago. From what I’ve been able to find online, Ledford is into exactly the kind of new digital media journalism that the BBC has been pushing for the last couple of years, and which many see as the future of journalism, full stop. No problem there, I’m just pointing out why the BBC looked to him for content. It makes perfect sense from a newsgathering standpoint.

(UPDATE: John Boch, from Guns Save Life has posted a comment below.)

Now for the bias. If we judge this piece simply on the basis of how much time is given to each side of the debate, then gun advocates win handily. More time is definitely given to their side. However, Ledford very cleverly undermines all of it.

Ledford was, for reasons unknown (not necessarily devious, just literally unknown to me, and the BBC doesn’t reveal any), doing some video journalism on the issue of gun rights for some time before the Newtown mass murder happened. So this piece was clearly not created with that particular agenda in mind. Was there an agenda anyway? I think so.

The first segment features gun advocates from the Guns Save Life group in Illinois. One of the Directors, John Naese, who seems to be acting as spokesman here, is given uninterrupted air time to explain the group’s positions on gun ownership laws.

The blurb accompanying the video on the BBC website says that Guns Save Life “are arguing for more permissive gun laws”. But are they? Considering that politicians in Illinois and in other parts of the country are always trying to enact ever more restrictive gun laws, one could just as easily say that the group is arguing to protect existing gun rights. But that would be speaking from their side of the argument. The opposite side of the argument is that they want more permissive gun laws. This bias is inherent in Ledford’s production and in the headline provided by the BBC sub editor. “More guns”. Gun advocates don’t necessarily want more guns, they just want to be allowed to keep what they own, and for citizens to keep the rights they already have. That’s not “more”.

The blurb also claims that Ledford’s video provides “an insight into the strongly held beliefs that influence discussion on this topic”. It doesn’t. What it really does is show you one perspective on the people who strongly hold certain beliefs about gun rights. Which is actually the goal of the piece. Naese pretty much just spells out the position on gun rights. There is no insight offered into the beliefs themselves. Nothing new is offered. But to people like Leford and the BBC editor who thought this was great stuff, the key is that they look down on the people who hold those beliefs.

The clever bit, though, comes after the segment featuring the Guns Save Life meeting. At the meeting, we’re treated to a scene of members reading out humorous rhymes about self defense. We then segue to the mother of a victim of some mass murder. Naturally, she is going to hold absolute moral authority, and actually claims it herself.

The first words out of the mother’s mouth are: “I don’t have a sense of humor about deadly force”.

Ooh, cuts you right to the quick, doesn’t it? Just look at those fat, hirsute, rednecks laughin’ about killin’. Pretty much destroys their argument, no? Well, no. The light-hearted scene has nothing whatsoever to do with the real attitude about gun rights, the right to bear arms, the right to self-defense. But that’s the “insight” Ledford wants to show you, and the brilliant point the BBC editor who selected this for publication saw and felt you needed to see. It’s fairly obvious that Ledford (or a student he sent over to do the interview) showed the woman footage of the fat old rednecks reading their little jokes, and asked something like, “So, what do you think of these assholes?”

Then the mother claims absolute moral authority by stating that the joking gun owners don’t know what it’s like to to lose a loved one.

If one goes by the stopwatch or word count, sure, the gun advocates get the lion’s share of the piece. But it’s very obvious where the weight of the feature lies: with the absolute moral authority of the mother who lost her only child. It doesn’t get more tear-jerking than that. The gun advocates are even given the last word, but it’s just more boilerplate, more simple spelling out of their position: banning guns doesn’t help. There’s no insight, no actual argument being made.

This, to the BBC, is the entire argument about gun rights in a nutshell: stupid rednecks who have no clue love their guns, while the reality is that innocents are killed and it hurts all of us. At no point are we given any actual insight into the gun owners’ beliefs, but we are given insight into why some people are against gun ownership. One side is portrayed as serious, based on morality and compassion, while the other side is portrayed as a figure of fun. It’s a biased piece, intended to denigrate gun rights advocates while elevating those on the other side of the argument.

Again, Ledford did this on his own. Or, at least, did part of it on his own and then got a  follow-up quote or two from the Guns Save Life folks after the Newtown tragedy at the BBC’s behest. Either way, the goal is clear, which is why the BBC selected it for publication.

*I hate the BBC’s title “Altered States”. It has negative connotations, implies things have changed, and not necessarily for the better. It’s been a running theme in BBC reporting since we elected a black man as President that the country has become more divisive, more messed up, more racist. This title emphasizes that perspective. Yes, I know it’s a reference to the rather entertaining little sci-fi movie starring William Hurt about a scientist who manages to regress himself back to a primitive state of evolution. It just supports my point.

AK-47s and AR-15s and Rocket Launchers – Oh, My!

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I’m a couple days late on this, but it’s still worth a laugh. The BBC sent one of the legion of Beeboids they have making video magazine reports in the US to Los Angeles to cover the special holiday edition of the city’s “Guns for Groceries” buy-back plan. Usually it’s useful for getting illegal guns out of the hands of the gang-bangers, allowing the politicians to wave some trophies in front of the cameras and scare the community a little bit. The gang-bangers like it because they can unload old weapons or ones they’ve used in crimes (these are no-questions-asked exchanges, remember) for some quick cash to buy more illegal guns. It’s win-win.

We’re told that, while “many Americans believe” that the 2nd Amendment gives us the right to bear arms, the mayor thinks there can be more controls. The annual buy-back program, we learn, is proof positive that there are too many guns out there, too easy to access.

The crowning example comes at the end, starting at around 1:10 in, where the police rep says that people were turning in AK-47s and “parts for AR-15s”. The BBC’s John McManus then says:

“If that sounds extreme, well, last year’s haul of 1700 weapons included an anti-tank rocket launcher.”

First of all, it’s opinion that having these weapons available is “extreme”. There’s no mention of whether or not any of them were legal or illegal or what. Their very existence is, apparently, extreme. The Beeboid is projecting opinion – what may very well be mainstream British opinion – onto a report about domestic affairs in a foreign country. And for all we know, the AK-47s came from Mexican drug gangs courtesy of the President’s “Fast & Furious” scheme.

But the really funny part is the freak-out about the anti-tank weapon. This may come as a complete surprise to parochial, close-minded media luvvies living in a bubble, but one can buy these online and at shows and other places. They’re military surplus, rendered inert before sale.

In fact, this year’s scheme brought in two of them. If the intrepid, impartial journalists at the BBC ever bother to read the NY Daily News, they’ll know that, and know that the weapons were already rendered useless. Not that it stopped the nannies from waving it in front of the cameras. You can bet there won’t be a correction coming from the BBC. That would detract from the agenda.

The scary rocket launcher is, in fact, quite harmless, but presented here to wind you up. A propaganda piece, advocacy plain and simple. Are lots of other media outlets singing from the same hymn sheet and getting it wrong? Sure they are. Does that make it okay for the BBC to do it? Remember, they sent at least one Beeboid to LA to film and investigate, so there’s no excuse for lemming journalism here.

I bet the dopey Beeboid doesn’t even know any of this. I’m sure he and his editor completely believe the angle he’s reported. Their bias on this issue prevents them from reporting honestly and accurately. If they do know that the rocket launcher was non-functional, then McManus is telling a lie the way he reported it. Either way this is a journalistic failure.

It’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t about the rights and wrongs of gun ownership, or anyone’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, nor is it about your opinion or mine of gun control laws. This is about a biased, misleading report from the BBC on a specific issue, where ideology informs and corrupts reporting. Even if you agree with the BBC’s position on gun control, you should still be displeased with them taking sides on any issue.

Bonus giggle: If I bought a nice Browning 1917A1 .50 cal machine gun and wanted to take it out the range, and I needed another can to carry my extra ammo, I could pick up a cheap one from the BBC-owned Lonely Planet website.

BBC Censorship: US Gun Laws, Gun Crime, And Reality

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Most people here will have noticed that the BBC has gone overboard this week with the hand-wringing over US gun laws. The same agenda – US gun laws are too permissive, gun ownership laws lead to a high homicide rate, etc. – has spread across the spectrum of BBC broadcasting, from the website to radio to television. All of it from the same angle: too much gun ownership, ordinary citizens probably shouldn’t be allowed to own guns, and all that. Not a single report or interview – as far as I’ve been able to find, and defenders of the indefensible are welcome to correct me and point out the exception – coming from the opposite viewpoint. Anyone seen a Beeboid challenge someone who says US gun laws need to be much, much stricter, or similar?

The BBC also made a big deal out of the President turning up in Colorado to pose as the caring leader, uniting us all under the banner of Hope, that the Beeboids know He really is. Not a single raised Beeboid eyebrow or sarcastic aside at how this might be a nice bit of political opportunism in a tough election cycle. He’d never do that, would He?

With all the whining about US gun laws and gun crime, there’s really something else you need to know. The BBC, of course, is censoring this news, refusing to tell you about it. Mark Mardell seems to have been on vacation for the last couple of weeks, so there isn’t even a word of wisdom from the BBC’s top man in the US, whom you are supposed to trust on these things.

Here’s a perfect example of what the BBC doesn’t want you to know about US gun laws and gun crime. It even concerns the President’s adopted home town, so one would think the Beeboids in the US would be aware of it:

Chicago Homicide Rate Worse Than Kabul, Up To 200 Police Assigned To High-Profile Wedding

As Chicago residents face a murder rate that, thus far this year, is worse than U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Chicago Police Department has assigned at least 100 officers to secure the wedding of White House advisor Valerie Jarrett’s daughter.

President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia and Sasha arrived in Chicago Friday evening ahead of the Saturday wedding of Laura Jarrett, which will be held in a backyard in the city’s Kenwood neighborhood. And that wedding is, expectedly, set to be a high-security affair.

This is the HuffingtonPost, folks. So the Beeboids know all about it. And this can’t be dismissed simply as extra security for the President, happens all the time.

The directive for police to cover the Jarrett wedding arrives at a time where Chicago is facing a surge in its homicide rate. The Daily pointed out in a Friday column that more Chicago residents — 228 — have been killed so far this year in the city than the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan – 144 — over the same period.

The war zone-like statistics are not new. As WBEZ reports, while some 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, more than 5,000 people have been killed by gun fire in Chicago during that time, based on Department of Defense and FBI data.

More than 5000 people. How many of them in random acts of mass murder by lunatics like the guy in Colorado or Loughner in Tucson? Pretty much zero. (Gang activity and drive=bys aren’t really the same thing at all, even when innocents are killed in the process.) That’s a body count high enough to make any Beeboid’s head spin, so Chicago and Illinois must have pretty lax gun laws, right? Must be sub-machine guns and RPGs for sale on every corner, a free shotgun with every Slurpee at the local 7-11, right?

Er…no. Illinois and Chicago have just about the toughest, strictest gun laws in the country. In fact, the local county currently has a law banning the very kind of assault weapon the Colorado lunatic used. And yet, Chicago has a much, much higher rate of gun murders than the whole State of Colorado: 120. That includes murder by other means, like stabbing, which means that the number of murders with actual guns is even lower. But that doesn’t help the BBC’s anti-gun agenda, so they don’t bother to check it out and instead push partisan propaganda at you.  Hell, even Washington, DC – the President’s current place of residence (when He’s not golfing or on vacation with rich white folks, that is) = with something like 12% of the population, has more murders per annum than Colorado. And DC also has very strict gun control laws. They’ve even tried to ban people from keeping a loaded handgun in the house for self defense, never mind buying a semi-automatic weapon and a high-capacity magazine.

Of course, there’s one very important difference between the victims in Aurora and those in Chicago and DC. The vast majority of the people shot and killed in Chicago and DC were black. The President isn’t going to be giving a Hopey speech to their families any time soon, I can assure. And it won’t even occur to single sycophantic Beeboid to ask why not. It also puts all the BBC long faces and rending of garments over the troop deaths in Afghanistan in perspective, no? Not such a high body count when taking reality into consideration. But I digress.

Furthermore, while the BBC spent all that effort discussing gun laws and gun crime, did anybody bother to ask how many guns Timothy McVeigh or the9/11 mass murderers or the 7/7 mass murderers needed? No? Funny, that.

Just a couple months ago, some lunatic went on a rampage with a knife in a grocery store in Salt Lake City. Utah, of course, has slightly more “lax” gun laws than Chicago or DC, but that isn’t going to prevent some idiot from grabbing a kitchen knife and running around with it. Even the BBC knows that. So a legally armed private citizen shot the f@#$er before he killed too many people. Again, the BBC won’t be bringing this kind of thing up because it doesn’t fit in with the Agenda.To balance out the constant stream of people advocating stricter gun laws, where are the guests saying that the massacre could have been stopped if somebody in the theater had been carrying?

There’s plenty of evidence – even begrudgingly admitted by the liberal New York Times – that European countries with more guns per capita have lower murder rates. But then, those countries are probably more homogenous, eh, BBC? Oh, my, better tone down the racism inherent in those facts.

When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. That’s good enough for the BBC, and they don’t want you to think any different.

Covering Up The Cover-Up

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(UPDATE: See below) The BBC has posted a news brief about the recent seizure of more than 250,000 rounds of assault weapon ammo being smuggled from the US into Mexico. Not a single mention of the massive story of Operation Fast & Furious, the scandal involving the ATF and the US Justice Dept. deliberately allowing weapons to be sold to arms dealers working with Mexican drug cartels in order to create a body count with which they could inspire more interest in stricter gun control laws.

As this blog has shown, the BBC has barely touched on this scandal at all, and has in fact censored most news about it. Here they’re doing it again. The scandal is highly relevant to this story of ammo smuggling, because the ammo is for the kinds of weapons sold to cartel gun-runners on orders from the US Government.

The BBC even has the gall to mention that the Mexican President is calling for stricter US gun laws, but deliberately censors information about how this has come to pass. They even bring up the body count meme, which is exactly what the gun control advocates in the Government wanted. Yet they censor the actual story behind it all.

The Beeboids behind this know exactly what they’ve done here, and why. This was a deliberate editorial decision to censor news for ideological purposes.

UPDATE: Now the truck driver’s boss says it was a legal shipment to Phoenix, and the driver took a wrong turn. Apparently an ammo sales company in Phoenix claims they ordered the stuff and it’s their shipment. Presumably the ATF is no longer telling them to sell it to gunrunners, so it’s legal stuff going to legal buyers. We’ll see.

If this turns out to be true, we can fully expect the BBC story to “evolve”, right? They don’t go running off to report sensational stories without waiting to see if the facts are correct, right?

BBC Censorship: ATF Scandal and Gun Control Edition

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A major ongoing scandal in the US is the revelation that the Dept. of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) deliberately allowed more than 2000 assault weapons to be sold to arms traffickers to sell to Mexican drug cartels. The head of the ATF has now been “re-assigned” to a keep-shtum-and-you-keep-your-pension job in another department, and the bureau chief in Arizona, where most of these guns went walkies, has been sacked.

The BBC report about this lays out the barest details, dutifully following the official White House version of what happened. To be fair, other than the odd human interest story or local atmosphere and color piece, the Beeboids in the US don’t do investigative or original reporting, and mostly rehash what they find in the liberal media they read, and where their friends work. So it’s no surprise that it’s heavy on quotes from the White House and light on facts about what the scandal is really about.

I won’t say that the BBC has been censoring news of the scandal the whole time, as they’ve done a few other news briefs about it during the past year. Naturally, those pieces also stick to the official White House version of events and fail to report what’s actually been going on.

The official version is that the ATF started this “Operation Fast and Furious” to track guns to Mexican drug cartels, in the hopes of, as the BBC reports, “tracing them to arms dealers”. Now, sting operations happen all the time in law enforcement, so this wouldn’t be unusual. Except, the White House changed their story. A BBC article from March has a slightly different “official version”, that the goal was to track the guns directly to drug cartel leaders. Which makes no sense at all. Still, first it was to catch the gun dealers, then it was to catch the drug leaders. Not that the BBC bothers to question it, as it’s official White House policy, which they must obey at all times. All they tell you is that the now ex-ATF director, Kenneth Melson, testified in Congress that “mistakes have been made”.

There’s so much that the BBC doesn’t want you to know about this, it’s not even funny. Actually, there is one funny bit: not long before this scandal first came to light, the BBC dutifully reported a success story for the operation instead. More on that in a moment.

What I’m going to do here is talk about what this scheme was really about, which is not the official version, provide links to the BBC reports, and let everyone decide for themselves if the BBC simply parroted the official version they got from the newswires and the White House and censored a huge amount of information which turns the story on its head – and points directly to the President Himself.



First, what this is all really about: a covert plan to create bloodshed which the President and His Administration could use to advance His gun control agenda. No, I’m not making this up. As we all know, the official story – repeated by the BBC – is that 70% of guns (the President and Sec. of State Clinton used to claim it was 90% – also repeated by the BBC – but what the hell, it’s only ideology, right?) used in Mexican drug violence come from the US. Never mind about how that’s not exactly true, as we’re talking about the White House version of reality, slavishly reported by the BBC.

In this piece, Steve Kingston (Hey, Kingston: how come you can pronounce “Juarez” with a flourish of Spanish accent, but can’t pronounce “Houston” the way the native whites do?) actually talks to one of the ATF agents who let the guns go walkies. Although here, it’s about how lax gun laws allow people to buy weapons easily and sell them along. See where this is going? It’s a gun control agenda, and the blurb for the video about how laws in the US are “more relaxed”. What the BBC is doing is here is actively supporting the official White House version of events, providing propaganda for the ATF scheme. In case that wasn’t enough, the BBC did a separate full piece on that agent as well. Good public value for the license fee, eh? One has to ask, though: just how much does this BBC reporter really know about it?

In any case, here’s that example of the BBC helping out with a bit of White House propaganda on the scheme. They report this minor incident, yet suppress so much important news. Agenda? What Agenda?

It’s a given that the Left would like guns to be outlawed entirely, and that their goals are to have the strictest gun control laws possible. Indeed, the Left has been pressuring the Obamessiah Administration to get tougher on guns practically from the time He took office. Yes, another Leftoid complaint about another missed opportunity to force legislation they like without having to soil their hands and deal with Republicans when they had a super-majority. The same people who now demand bi-partisanship and working together, and frown at Tea Party intransigence. But I digress.

Long before He even ran for Senator, the President was on the board of the Joyce Foundation (what a shock: He threw some money their way this year), which has long been an advocate of banning guns. He also came from the notorious political machine of Chicago, which is one of the stricest places in the country. One cannot even own a handgun or automatic weapon within the city limits. In short, He has history on this.

Fast forward to March of this year, when this scandal was a mere blip on the radar in the mainstream media, and not many people were talking about this being something other than what the White House said it was. Jim Brady (Reagan Press Secretary permanently severely disabled when he took a bullet when that President was shot) and his wife, both leading activists with their own foundation, met with current Press Secretary (husband of BBC Washington correspondent Katty Kay’s friend and business partner) Jay Carney to pressure the Administration about getting a move on enforcing more gun control laws. During the meeting, the President Himself walked in, and was also asked to reassure them that strictest gun control was high on the Administration’s agenda. Apparently, it was. Only not publicly.

“I just want you to know that we are working on it,” Brady recalled the president telling them. “We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”

He knew. The President Himself knew about the whole thing, and no mistake. To borrow from Sandy Toksvig in a way she’d absolutely hate, He puts the other “u” in “gun control”. This is the Washington Post, ladies and gentlemen. There’s no way at least one Beeboid doesn’t know about this.

The dots begin to connect. When ex-ATF boss Melson was testifying before Congress about all this a while back, he said quite a bit more than the BBC let on. Among those “mistakes” he talked about were incidents where ATF agents were ordered to step aside and not bust gun traffickers. Which allegedly is what the whole scheme was about. And he didn’t mean ordered by him, either. Melson also said that one reason given to him – the head of the agency, remember – was that some of these people were working as informants for other agencies. Which means that this is so not just about the ATF. The FBI is involved, and the DEA is involved. All three agencies had to know in order to give such an order. This is bigger than the BBC is letting on.

Sen. Darrell Issa, on the other hand, who led the Congressional investigation into this whole thing in the first place, knows exactly what’s going on. The ever-faithful Washington Post claimed that the Administration told Issa all about it last year, and that he had no problem with it. Even the WaPo admits his aides say they didn’t give him any actual details, and Issa says they didn’t tell him any details at all. In fact, he still has questions about just how high up this goes, considering all the agencies involved and orders coming down from on high to the head of the ATF. Part of Melson’s testimony was to Issa privately, with Melson’s own attorney instead of the Government guys. Issa says there’s more to this that he knows about but can’t say until the Administration releases more documents. Melson says Attorney General Eric Holder is stalling. I wonder why? The BBC is uninterested.

Now, officially, the Obamessiah Administration says that this was a failure, an “oops”, and that neither Holder nor the President knew. That’s the story the BBC presents, without the slightest hint of anything else. That’s why Melson and the AZ guy got the boot, right? So why are some of the people busted by the ATF as part of this operation getting deals to cut their prison sentences way down? This includes – Hello! – the New Mexico mayor busted for arms dealing as reported in that BBC propaganda piece story about the ATF’s success in their mission that I mentioned above. Worse than that, why were the top three supervisors of the whole thing given promotions a couple weeks ago. Some “botched operation”. I wish I had made such successful mistakes.

Does this smell bad enough yet? Plenty of information out there, and the BBC is utterly silent, simply reporting the mainstream, President-supporting media take on it, which parrots the official line. In Melson and the AZ man, they found their scapegoat. Holder can pretend he didn’t know. And as we’ve already seen, the President knew. Lastly, here’s one of the ATF internal emails Issa released, where the Asst. Director of Field Operations, Mark Chait, says this:

Bill – can you see if these guns where purchased from the same Ffl and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales.

“Bill” is William Newell, the AZ guy who just got “re-assigned”. What a shock.

In the end, this Operation Fast and Furious was a scheme hatched at least near the very top, and was authorized by the President and the Attorney General, all with the goal of getting people killed so they could push their gun ban agenda. And the BBC is a willing accomplice, following that agenda, unquestioning.

Don’t trust the BBC on US issues.

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BAN ALL GUNS…

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Moonbat time on the BBC each Sunday with Nicky Campbell and “The Big Question”. This morning the audience is in fine voice DEMANDING that all guns be banned. Those on the other side of the argument were shouted down. Of course the BBC also believes all guns should be banned so those loons doing the shouting and screaming in the audience are actually articulating the State Broadcasters feelings.

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