It’s been an interesting weekend for electronic journalism related to firearms ownership. On Friday night, ABC’s “20/20” devoted its entire hour to one of the worst hatchet jobs ever perpetrated on the viewing public, titled “If I Only Had a Gun.”  On Sunday evening, “60 Minutes” from CBS somewhat restored my faith in TV reporters.

Leslie Stahl did the “60 Minutes” segment on the gun-and-ammo buying frenzy, and if you’ll forgive a cliché, I found her treatment to indeed be “fair and balanced.”  She threw hard questions at spokespersons from both sides, and she gave plenty of face time to Phil Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, who did a simply outstanding job of explaining such things as why buying an AR15 or something right now isn’t paranoid, because the current President has made it clear that he does indeed want to restore the “assault weapon ban” and make it permanent. CBS even showed and highlighted that segment on Obama’s own website.  Van Cleave’s logic and common sense were a breath of fresh air strong enough to blow away the usual BS.

Not so the Friday night broadcast from ABC orchestrated by Diane Sawyer. To make the point that an armed citizen would stand no chance against a single psycho gunman, the show engineered a totally “set ‘em up to fail” scenario in which some college kids were outfitted with Simunitions™ Glocks, which fired paintballs. After limited familiarization, which apparently did not include drawing the guns from concealment, the kids were outfitted with safety-strap and SERPA security holsters that they obviously hadn’t adequately learned how to draw from. These were then concealed under long white T-shirts that went down below their backsides, and clung tightly to the holstered pistols.  When a trained firearms instructor playing the role of the psycho entered the classroom and started shooting, the kids in the good guy role might as well have been wearing strait jackets.  The “gunman” also seemed to know before hand who would have the concealed weapons, because he zoomed right in on them.  They didn’t have a chance.

(Nonetheless, one bad guy role-player, an honest cop, was hit by a female student’s paintball bullet and went down. She had obviously stopped the killing.  However, in the subsequent interview and reconstruction, Ms. Sawyer managed to spin this into the armed rescuer being killed and the bad guy only wounded.)

At the end, Diane Sawyer earned the “disingenuous at best” award when she told the audience that she had looked for data showing where armed citizens had stopped mass murders, but couldn’t find any that wasn’t contradictory.

She apparently didn’t look that hard. It wasn’t that long ago that an off-duty cop with a Kimber .45 (who might just as easily been an armed citizen with a concealed carry permit) engaged the gunman in Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square Mall and stopped the murders by pinning him down until the SWAT team could get there to finish him off.  And how about Jeanne Assam, the courageous parishioner who drew her concealed and licensed Beretta 9mm and cut short a mass murder in a Colorado church by shooting the killer down like the dog he was?  Or Joel Myrick, the brave vice principal in the Pearl, Mississippi school shooting who retrieved his Colt .45 from his car and took spree killer Luke Woodham at gunpoint, ending the terror and the death toll right there?

Kudos to Leslie Stahl, “60 Minutes,” and CBS for having the integrity to show both sides of a complicated issue.  By contrast, ABC’s latest “20/20” outing with Diane Sawyer should be used in journalism school to show the students how degrading it is to their profession to disguise blatantly deceptive propaganda as an impartial news program.

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