You can tell how ancient I am when I say that in my youth people used to argue about things and demand to see something in black and white before believing it. For the current generation I would probably have to translate that…it means ‘ on the printed page,’ white paper and black ink. Pages, like in books.

I remember an incident when I was a Senior Editor at a science text book publisher in Chicago in the 70’s. One of my best qualified Biology editors had an argument with her father. He said that he would only believe it if he saw it in black and white. She produced a research paper and showed him it in black and white. He conceded the point and was a little put out when she showed him the author. She had written the paper herself. His daughter he could not believe as a person, but as an authoritative voice on a piece of white paper he believed her.

Nowadays as newspapers go bankrupt and we have a nation of people who must have pictures of everything we have been in the age of ‘I saw it on tele,’ as the ultimate debating point for quite a while. And therein lies considerable danger. It is very easy to form the opinions of those who rely on pictures and sound rather than on reading and considering and reviewing material. And if the producers of the pictures and sound have a hidden agenda it isn’t as easy for the looking-seeing generation to figure out that agenda as it would be if it were printed and easier to review. And many unscrupulous people in the media are taking advantage of that.

Since I write articles about many things that interest me, knowing that if the non unique Douglas is interested, then maybe some others may be interested in some of them, I’ll mention a public visual that was a total setup, designed not to inform but to mislead. And I bet a great many people have had their ideas molded by such pictures and will say with authority, “I know it’s true. I saw it on tele.”

The anti gun politicians have been waiting in the wings to start their campaign to disarm honest American citizens. The media hasn’t been waiting in the wings. Their campaign has already begun.

Mark Shields of PBS said that the only reason the 1994 “assault weapon” ban expired is that Congress needed “a vertebrae implant.” Bob Herbert in the New York Times claimed that America is “neither mature nor civilized enough to do anything” about armed crime. Both of these gentlemen are in an excellent position to know that gun related crime is least in those states where people are allowed to carry handguns. But that fact upsets the controversy that is being created for political ends. Truth must never interfere with policy as we know.

But you may have seen the hour long episode on ABC’s 20/20 which was billed as “a year long exploration” of the gun issue. The people reporting on the matter and the producers of the program set up a deliberately flawed ‘experiment’ to prove that you are too incompetent to defend yourself. Somebody with a lot of money must want you to believe that.

The set up sounds like a good experiment. ABC recruited college students interested in firearm training and showed them how to fire handguns used to fire paint blotchers at a velocity harmless to anyone wearing clothing.

Then they armed one student at a time with the handgun loaded with the paint marking shells and sat that student with others in a college lecture hall. After the class began a person playing the part of a mass killer burst into the room, fired quickly at the teacher and then immediately fired at the ‘armed’ student to see if he or she would respond effectively.

Now that sounds OK on the face of it. But now look at the organization that wasn’t mentioned. The ‘attacker’ was not a mentally disturbed teenager taking prescription drugs for depression like the one who usually commits this kind of crime. The ‘attacker’ was an adult, experienced, police firearms instructor.

Point one. Point two. In every case the ‘armed’ student was in EXACTLY the same place, in the middle of the front row, totally exposed and with no place to maneuver. The policemen knew exactly who he was aiming to get every time, and exactly where that person would be.

To ensure the results that ABC wanted, as if this wasn’t enough, many of the ‘good’ students were given holsters for their guns. The holsters were attached to the wrong place on their belts and the gun was covered with extremely long baggy shirts. Not exactly a level playing field, but gun reporting seldom is.

This piece of crooked commentary was compared by knowledgeable people to the 1993 NBC Dateline report in which NBC rigged GM trucks with explosives and then videotaped the trucks blowing up in collisions, to ‘prove’ to those who ‘ saw it on tele’ that the trucks were unsafe.

While the ABC fiasco was going on there was a voice over commentary by Diane Sawyer to ensure that whatever the ‘good’ student did he or she would get no credit. One girl Danielle hit the attacker in the leg but “took a deadly shot to the head.” Another student also hit the bad guy, “Though he hits the intruder it’s not before he takes a hit to the chest.” In other words no wound will stop the intruder, but any wound will stop the good guys. Resistance is futile.

The whole set-up was crooked and all the assumptions are incorrect (or lies, whichever). Our own military records are filled with stories of soldiers taking terrible wounds and carrying on. My uncles fought in the Italian campaign and reported young Germans of fifteen years old with both legs shot away still manning the machine guns in the mountain caves.

Furthermore, all the research by law enforcement trainer Ron Borsch indicates that the real world mass killer is cowardly. To quote him, these murderers “typically fold quickly upon armed confrontation with 90% committing suicide at the scene of their crimes.”

That is exactly what happened in cases where armed citizens intervened against real mass killers. A murderer in a Colorado church committed suicide after being shot by a Right-to-Carry permit holder who volunteered to provide security at the church. A killer at a Virginia law school surrendered to a pair of armed students. A murderer in Pearl, Miss., surrendered when confronted by an armed vice principal. Every month in the ‘Armed Citizen’ section of NRA magazines are reports where good people use guns to prevent crime. That isn’t news. It’s politically incorrect to know that.

The 20/20 reporter’s propaganda went even further to blur all the real issues. “When the intruder bursts in on Ashley,” said Sawyer, “she does not fumble…She and the gunman battle it out.” And although Ashley did hit the attacker in the shoulder Sawyer criticized her for coming “within inches of hitting one of her fellow students.” ABC never bothered to think or say that Ashley could have stopped a crazy killer and thereby could have saved several of her student peers.

And then Sawyer summed up this piece of fakery with what I hope for the sake of ABC was a lie and not an expression of incompetence. She said:

“And by the way, if you are wondering where are all the studies about the effectiveness of guns used by ordinary Americans for self defense, well, keep searching. We could not find one reliable study. And the ones we found were contradictory”

Sounds a lot like the spokesmen for Sloan Kettering saying that they have found after two years of research that Laetrile is useless for treating cancer. They lied and knew it.

If Sawyer’s statement was true then maybe ABC should hire an out of work computer savvy teenager to do their research, since their own team is obviously incompetent. Apparently they didn’t research any of the professionals on this matter, the criminologists.

Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz are criminologists and they showed that there are hundreds of thousands of reports annually of successful defensive gun uses. The research was reliable enough to be endorsed by another criminologist, the late Marvin Wolfgang who was anti gun. Kleck’s book based on this research, that maybe Sawyer should read, was entitled Point Blank, and won the 1993 Michael Hindelang Award of the American Society of Criminology for the best book in the field. Maybe ABC should have talked to the people who know how things are rather than fake up something about how they think things ought to be.

Fox News, which doesn’t get much praise from me as you know, had a commentary on this 20/20 fiasco, sorry, this 20/20 piece, and on it John R. Lott Jr. who is a noted economist said, “There have been 26 peer reviewed studies published by criminologists and economists in academic journals and university presses. Most of these studies find large drops in crime [under Right-to-Carry Laws]. Some find no change, but not a single one shows an increase in crime.

One of those 26 peer reviewed studies by people who studied the facts instead of writing plays about their prejudice, was by Lott himself. His book was More Guns, Less Crime. Maybe the ABC folks couldn't read the stuff in academic journals and university presses, way above 8th grade standard.

You are being deceived by people who for some reason or other want you to be incapable of defending yourself against an armed criminal, or indeed any criminal. The people doing this can spin a good spin and are paid well to do it, also for some reason that requires a little thought. Don’t be fooled by the lies about alternative medicine, the lies about the dedicated soldiers of medicine fighting for your health, the lies about the FDA being on your side or the lie that disarming you will make you safer. Above all, don't believe everything you see, just because it's on tele.