I grew up watching NBC News because our local TV station was an NBC affiliate. We’d hit the local news, followed by the network news.
It wasn’t until I was a fair bit older–older than I’d like to admit, really–when I realized just how biased NBC News actually was. It was kind of jarring.
They’re especially bad about issues like guns, and I cringe every time I find an article from them on the topic. It’s usually not likely they’ll speak with anyone who understands them and when they do, they aren’t exactly flattering.
So when I saw they published a piece on gun storage, well, I was prepared to be disappointed. Especially when it talked about “experts.” That usually means anti-gun mouthpieces who have never even touched a gun without fainting, so the advice is going to be geared to make guns as useless as possible.
That…didn’t happen.
Instead, it’s a sober, reasonable discussion of various methods of gun storage, some of their pros and cons, and mostly just leaves it there.
Yes, it cites studies that claims most gun owners aren’t securing their guns, but those are the studies that are out there. I’m not going to fault the writer for going there when that’s the information available.
This is perhaps the most troubling part of the piece:
Twenty-six states and Washington, D.C., have safe-storage laws that punish gun owners if a child accesses an unsecured firearm. These laws have drawn support from gun safety advocates and the U.S. Surgeon General, but they’re opposed by gun rights groups that argue people should be free to decide when and how to secure their weapons.
That’s not quite how the debate falls–mandatory storage laws have a bad habit of getting in the way of someone’s self-defense needs, which is why gun rights advocates oppose them–so this bit presents a bit of the writer’s bias, but this is someone working for NBC News.
Nothing about this is surprising.
Yet from here, it’s just a brief discussion of some of the gun storage options out there. It’s very brief, so a lot of nuance is missing, and there seems to be a phobia about guns loaded, but it’s not the most terrible article on the topic I’ve ever seen.
So that leads me to wonder why NBC News never thought to write it before.
Oh, I get that Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made headlines recently talking about this as a small part of his overall desire to see our gun rights stomped on, but there was no reason not to discuss this a lot earlier.
We have a reach here at Bearing Arms. The other gun rights sites out there do as well, and ours may well be more targeted than NBC News ever would be, but they have a broader reach and they can speak to the more casual gun owner.
They could have hit this years ago. They could rehash it regularly, even, just to make sure that people know what their options actually are.
Why didn’t they?
For people who seem to believe they have the duty to change the world, this is a simple thing they could have done ages ago.
