There's a saying that's been popular of late: No matter how much you hate the media, you don't have them enough.
I'd love to say that's just pure hyperbole, but it's not. It's not in the least.
After all, this is the same media that just tried to use the horrific murder of an NRA staffer to try and attack the NRA.
Rolling Stone--which has a long history of ridiculously bad journalism--teamed up with The Trace, which bills itself as an organization dedicated to journalism on gun issues but is really just an anti-gun PR firm to tell the story of an NRA employee, Dawn Williams-Stewart, who was murdered by her husband, and then politicize the crap out of it.
ne week in November 2008, Dawn Williams-Stewart showed up for work at the headquarters of the National Rifle Association, in Fairfax, Virginia, with bruises on her face. A close friend in the financial services division, where Dawn worked, saw her crying.
“Look at my mouth,” Dawn said, according to notes from a law enforcement investigation. Her husband, Antonio Stewart, had almost broken her jaw, she explained.
Dawn, who was 41, and among the NRA’s few Black employees, had been open with coworkers about her fear of Stewart; she was in an abusive relationship, and disclosed that he had threatened to kill her. She confided to a senior colleague, Sonya Rowling, who is now the NRA’s treasurer and chief financial officer, that Stewart said, “If I can’t have you, no one can.”
Dawn and Rowling had recently discussed getting a restraining order against Stewart. Dawn had been reluctant because she thought it might inflame him, so Rowling said the NRA would help when she was ready. On the day she saw Dawn’s jaw, Rowling insisted it was time to move forward and meet with Gordon Russell, then the NRA’s head of security. The three gathered together, and Dawn described her situation. Russell instructed her to get a restraining order. The NRA’s general counsel, the investigative notes say, sent Stewart a letter informing him that he was prohibited from the organization’s property.
It’s unclear whether Dawn followed through with the restraining order, but even if she had, that legal process can be convoluted and unreliable, especially when a gun is involved. What she needed was an Extreme Risk Protection Order, obtainable under a red-flag law. Such a statute expressly provides a person in Dawn’s position the opportunity to go before a judge and make a case under oath that her husband should be immediately disarmed because access to firearms puts her life in imminent danger.
Here's the thing, though. As we learned during the Rahimi decision, a restraining order for domestic violence comes with an order to surrender any firearms someone may have.
So it's unlikely Dawn got that restraining order or, if she did, it clearly didn't do anything.
And red flag laws don't always result in someone being "immediately disarmed," as my colleague Cam Edwards noted over at Bearing Arms. Sometimes, they learn about those orders via mail, so there's no way they're immediately disarmed.
So a restraining order would have done the trick, the red flag laws don't work like they claim, and they're drudging up a murder that took place in 2008, well before the extreme push for red flag orders began anyway.
Of course, the NRA wasn't exactly thrilled with this..."reporting."
In an email, the NRA accused The Trace and Rolling Stone of “politicizing the tragic murder of a member of the NRA family in an attempt to support a specious argument about ‘red-flag’ laws.” The organization did not answer questions or engage with the specifics of a summary covering the details of this story.
Because that's exactly what happened.
Honestly, this is disgusting.
They can call this journalism all they want, but this is exactly how you politicize a tragedy to try and support an argument that absolutely has nothing to do with what they claim it does.
First, a ton of women are hesitant to get restraining orders against violent partners. If they won't get those, that not only will disarm their abusers but also require them to stay away, then why would they get red flag orders?
Rolling Stone admits that they don't know if Dawn got a restraining order or not, which is a red flag all its own. It means they don't know all that much other than a staffer for the NRA was murdered.
But the NRA wasn't responsible for that.
That's irrelevant to the media, though. They saw Dawn as not a victim but an opportunity. They desecrated her corpse by trying to turn it into a soapbox to pontificate about our rights not actually mattering. They can't illustrate that Dawn would have survived if this law was on the books because they can't show that there was no other way to accomplish any of it.
In fact, there was and they can't even show that it was used, all while trying to convince the masses that if we infringed on gun rights just a smidge more, everything would have turned out differently.
It's disgusting.
Our language standards prevent me from describing it the way I really want to, but you're all smart people. You have sufficient imagination to figure out a close approximation of what I want to say.
But I will say that no matter how much you hate the media, you don't hate them enough.