Rosie O'Donnell, Katie Couric, 'Supposed' Fans of Gun Control?

[gunsmith]

This thread! NRA Sounds Alarms on Gun Control
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=244966

This article!
NRA Sounds Alarm of Not-So-Imminent Threat

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Tuesday, January 2, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/01/AR2007010100682.html

Needs a response like this.
http://newsbusters.org/node/9907

Rosie O'Donnell, Katie Couric, 'Supposed' Fans of Gun Control?
Posted by Tim Graham on January 2, 2007 - 07:02.

On the Federal Page in Tuesday's Washington Post, Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covers lobbying, suggests it's not "genuine" for the National Rifle Association to sound the alarm on threats to gun rights at the moment: "No one expects gun legislation to pass this year." But in dismissing the "not-so-imminent threat" (as the article's headline describes it), Birnbaum goes too far:

The document is filled with sinister-looking caricatures of supposed anti-gun figures such as filmmaker Michael Moore, comedian Rosie O'Donnell, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R) and CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

Supposed? Doesn't Birnbaum remember Rosie trying to wallop NRA spokesman Tom Selleck into submission? Obviously, he doesn't remember then-NBC host Katie Couric asking NRA chief Charlton Heston to admit to the need for gun control in a June 1998 interview:

-- "Speaking of gun safety and children Mr. Heston, as you well know and in fact as everyone in this country knows there has been a spate of school shootings recently that have been quite disturbing to all Americans. Given the fact that these seem to be happening with greater frequency has it caused you to rethink your philosophy about children and guns and the accessibility of guns for children?"

--"But Mr. Heston, don't you think that if deep, if children are deeply disturbed, there might be another way for them to deal with conflict if guns were not so readily available to them?"

-- "Getting back to kids and guns, if you will indulge me for a moment. You cannot think of any other position the NRA could take in terms of trying to decrease the number of school shootings? You feel like this is not your bailiwick, this is not your problem?"

Charlton Heston: "Not at all. As I told you the NRA spends more money, more time..."

Couric, cutting him off: "Other than education."

Heston: "Well what would you suppose? What would you suggest?"

Couric: "I don't know, perhaps greater restrictions."

 

[wingman]

Rosie O'Donnell, Katie Couric

Not trying to take this off direction but I've never understood why anyone would watch either of the above.

 

[JohnBT]

I read that article in the Post and got a real chuckle out of it. Thanks for posting it.

John

 

[gunsmith]

supposed anti gunner Mike Moore?

supposed anti hunter PETA?
supposed anti capitalist Chairman Mao?
supposed anti Semite Adolph Hitler?
supposed anti slavery guy John Brown?

They wonder why no one believes the MSM anymore?

 

[Speer]

Doesn't Birnbaum remember Rosie trying to wallop NRA spokesman Tom Selleck into submission?

She did, too. Selleck's "performance" was just sad. NRA spokespeople need to handle pressure, and throw the argument back in the gun grabbers face.

Heston: "Well what would you suppose? What would you suggest?"

Yeah, sure, go ahead and ask some gun grabber what she thinks should be done.

 

[gunsmith]

Heston

Probably had the undiagnosed alshiermer
Selleck was ambushed, was there to promote movie.

Ted is great though

 

[The Cavalry]

They're not fans of gun control.

They want victim disarmament, plain and simple.

Rosie can afford an armed guard, she and Katie can afford car service to and from their high-end residences.

When my wife or I are loading our kids into the car after work, in a dark parking lot, alone, we don't have these luxuries.

At best, Katie benignly doesn't care.

Rosie malignantly wants us to be disarmed victims, so she can blame "dubya" for it.

They're both scum.

 

[gyp_c2]

hmmm...

That's odd, I don't remember Tom Selleck as appearing sad at all...

Maybe its' my turn for Alzheimers', but I remembered him doing a great job of enraging the bovine princess, to the point of stuttering, without ever raising his voice or resorting to name-calling...or backing down...

...yup, musta' been wishful_thinkin' on my part...

I kinda' like the Monte Walsh approach...

...you're probably right though, we do need someone that'll pick up the gauntlet and actually thrash around and make as much noise as they do...

I don't remember Tom Selleck as a representative for the NRA, I thought he was just blindsided by someone with an agenda, ambushed literally in front of an audience of millions and placed on a spot that not many will ever have to stand...

 

[Robert Hairless]

Ms. Couric has valid points that need to be addressed. Some school children are deeply disturbed and easily incited by fantasies of using guns to kill people. She is quite right that we need greater restrictions, which obviously need to be placed on the media immediately so that they are prevented from creating and fostering murderous fantasies in kids.

We need to have complete censorship of all media immediately. One way to start is for the Attorney General to publish a list of all undesirable subject matter for television, newspapers, magazines, books, radio, recordings of all kinds, billboards, advertisements, and all other forms of communication. Violators should be brought to justice immediately, their assets seized, and they should be imprisoned for no less than ten years for each violation. Of course they should lose all rights denied to other felons, including the right to vote and the right to own, acquire, or possess any firearm. They also should be denied the right to own, acquire, or possess any means of communicating with other people, such as a computer or typewriter, paper, or telephone of any kind.

Gun laws could serve as the guidelines for the kinds of laws and punishments needed to implement this necessary and long overdue censorship of the people who create murderous fantasies in children. We also need a national agency similar to the BATFE to help enforce these essential censorship laws designed to protect our children: perhaps the way to do it is to expand the BATFE so it becomes the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, and Media--the BATFEM.

It goes without saying that none of that would be much good if we didn't license all media companies. This country has desperately needed a Federal Media License, an FML, for some time. As things stand now and throughout our country's history we have allowed unqualified people to make statements that affect our children. That's obviously absurd. We also need to do a background check on everyone who attempts to communicate. It should be a simple matter to expand the National Instant Criminal Background Check System initiated by The Brady Act in 1998 so that it includes all people involved in the media. And that check should be made before each act of communication (before allowing a TV broadcast, for example, or issue of a newspaper or magazine, or recording).

There is no reason why the media shouldn't have a cooling off period of five days before each communication. And no media outlet really needs to do more than one act of communication in any thirty day period.

Only this way will we be able to raise our children in a good mental and emotional environment. Let us step forward boldly to ensure that this generation of children is at last free from the taints imposed upon previous generations by a corrupt and irresponsible media.

Despite what the media might say, the First Amendment does not prohibit such actions. The First Amendment grants a collective right to freedom of the press, not a right available to just anyone. It protects the people in general, not anyone in particular. The framers of the Constitution could not possibly have anticipated modern technology based on electricity: electricity was nothing more than a natural phenomenon and a curiousity to be explored by 18th Century eccentrics such as Benjamin Franklin. Therefore there is no basis for any reasonable person to believe that the First Amendment protects any medium that depends in any way on electricity. Television, radio, recordings, the Internet, and newspapers, books, and magazines produced on electrically operated high speed presses are not covered by the First Amendment.

The above is only a sketch for the kinds of actions that must be taken. It can and should be expanded at the national level, and also at the state and local levels, all of which must have the ability to institute their own censorship laws.

 

[AmbulanceDriver]

Robert, thank you. That was perhaps the most cocise, pointed, and insightful post I've read in quite a while. I've read the first vs. second amendment argument before, and I like the comparisons drawn, but your post was the best phrased argument I've seen.

Thanks..

Now to go piss off my anti co-workers.....

 

[Groundhog]

Media Control

Mr. Hairless, I would like your permission to reprint your very well written article for use in various ways. Like forwarding a copy to our local newspapers, and to the tv stations. I might even send a copy to Ms. Couric. I would not dare to send it to the O'Donnel dame. She would send her goons after me, and I would end up in jail for defending myself. Thanks for a very intriquing article.
Groundhog.....

 

[Robert Hairless]

Of course you have my permission.

If you send copies to Ms. Couric, Ms. O'Donnell, or anyone else perhaps you should include a copy of this statement by one who helped shape the media today: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

Joseph Goebbels the author has been dead for many years (ever since that unfortunate incident in which he fed his family something that disagreed with them), but he would be proud of the thinking demonstrated by Ms. Couric, Ms. O'Donnell, and their peers in their zeal to use their great intellectual capacity to protect lesser Americans from the folly of exercising their own judgment. It's so messy when other people are allowed to live their own lives as they see fit. We must put a stop to it.

I do so enjoy helping.

 

[gunsmith]

3 Cheers for Mr Hairless!

A fantastic rebuttal.
I plan on using your terrific points myself.

It lends itself to an argument I have been using.
Anti's like to say that we have a militia and therefore the 2nd applies to them (nat grd) Well I say we have an State Assembly as well, so the 1st only applies to them then?

 

[Robert Hairless]

At least some of you recognize that everything I wrote in that message is factual. Although the media and the people who make their living from it like to focus on guns as the cause of crime, they are practicing cynical misdirection when they do so.

The Collector, John Fowle's 1963 novel and the 1965 movie based on it by William Wyler, is known to have triggered at least 5 serial killers and at least 40 murders. Leonard Lake and Charles NG used Fowle's work as their guideline for murdering at least 25 people including two babies. A police inspector believes that there were many more. Lake's diary said that The Collector inspired him: "Ah, The Collector. Has it really been near 20 years I’ve carried this fantasy? And Miranda…how fitting…my lovely little prisoner of the future. I suppose in my way I am the same wimp as ‘the hero,’ and in my way just as crazy." Each of the other serial killers who have been caught implicated The Collector as the source of their murderous fantasies. Robert Berdella, one of those killers, who murdered more than 20 young men was a member of his neighborhood's Crime Watch, by the way, which (according to Ms. Couric's logic) makes all of those people potentially dangerous and worth restricting. Who among us could deny the value of such logic if it helps save even one child? Strict control of all Crime Watch participants should have caught Berdella and prevented more than 20 murders of young men. We need to stamp out neighborhood Crime Watch organizations immediately and ruthlessly. Ms. Couric should agree. So far as I know, guns were not used in any of The Collector murders. They were not in the murder directions written by John Fowles and followed by these deranged killers.

Sarah Brady knows that when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Reagan and maimed her husband Jim for life, Hinckley's gun was merely the instrument. His motive was to impress a teenage actress, Jodie Foster, with whom he was obsessed. His inspiration was Martin Scorses's film Taxi Driver, in which 14-year-old Jodie Foster played a pre-teen prostitute. Ms. Foster was honored by her fellow actors with an Oscar nomination for that role.

Songs, singers, and record producers are dangerous and must be restricted:

• Charles Manson was triggered as a murderer responsible for deaths including an unborn baby carried by actress Sharon Tate by The Beatle's song "Helter Skelter" and by an apparent slight from Terry Melcher, a record producer and the son of singer and actress Doris Day.
  
• Two teenagers in Reno, Nevada, tried to commit suicide under the inspiration of a Judas Priest song "Better By You, Better Than Me.”
  
• Two men raped a girl while singing Nirvana’s “Polly,” which prompted the group's leader to say that it was difficult "carrying on knowing there are plankton like that in our audience.” But of course he did "carry on" because there's big money in being a famous group of singers and recording artists.

I could go on and on. You could too. Check for yourself and see the damage caused by the unrestricted media and its attempt to shift the blame for its harm elsewhere.

It's not a question of whether or not guns kill people. The real point is that guns don't tell people to kill other people and don't tell people how to do it.

The media does those unforgiveable things, and it does them for money, to support life styles that far exceed the dreams of ordinary people.

The media is how kids who kill themselves and other people get their ideas.

And the kids don't need guns to implement those murderous ideas. The media--Ms. Couric's and Ms. O'Donnell's bread-and-butter, and cake, and wealth, and privilege--tell the kids how to do it with or without guns.

The media will continue to do it and claim a First Amendment right to do it, while they misdirect the blame to those who claim a Second Amendment right to protect themselve from the demons created, motivated, and unleashed by the media.

Ms. Couric, however, won't look at herself and her friends to see the awful harm they cause. I don't blame them. If I were them, I don't think I could stand to do it either. Perhaps, in Ms. Couric's own words, what they need is "greater restrictions." Perhaps they need it now.

How long can a free country survive an unrestricted and irresponsible media that incites it to violence and destroys its good sense? Ms. Couric has made a good point that is well worth considering by anyone who wants to distort or destroy the Bill of Rights.

The distinguished lawyer and civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz said: "I really do believe that for somebody who reads the First Amendment broadly, the Fourth Amendment broadly, the Fifth Amendment broadly, suddenly to read the Second Amendment narrowly is inconsistent and hypocritical. So I think that there is a constitutional right to bear arms."

And then, with marvelous grace, he performs a beautiful feat of acrobatics and concludes: "But I think it's a limited right. I think it's the right to have a gun in your home for self-protection. I don't think it necessarily entails the right of an automatic sub-machine gun or the right not to have it registered."

By that same logic the First Amendment is a "limited right" too, and so are they all. Of course there should be freedom of the press, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the press--and all other media--has the right not to be controlled and of course it can't mean that the protection extends to rapid fire communications either. The Bill of Rights, as Mr. Dershowitz said so well, must be read the same way throughout: broadly or narrowly, not one way and the other when it supports the reader's beliefs.

Speaking only for myself, I'm quite willing to entertain a narrow interpretation of the entire Bill of Rights. But let us do it the fairest possible way, logically and rationally, in numerical order. Let us first consider doing away with the broad interpretation of the First Amendment guarantees for freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion so that we narrow each of those rights. Then let us move on to all the rest of the Bill of Rights, one by one, narrowing each of them in numerical order.

That way Ms. Couric, Ms. O'Donnell, Mrs. Brady, Ms. Pelosi, and Ms. Clinton should not object when we narrow Amendment XIX so as to apply it properly, for who could possibly want to restrict people from voting simply because they have sex? "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

 

[Durruti]

Is there anything else that Katie Couric has said that supports an anti-gun position? This line of questioning alone just doesn't do it for me. I would expect a good journalist to challenge Charlton Heston with some anti-gun questions in the same way I would expect a good journalist to challenge Sarah Brady with some pro-gun questions.

 

[Robert Hairless]

Good question, Durruti, but this is the first week in January and I believe that your personal research assistant is still on vacation. Perhaps you yourself could try doing the research needed to answer your question until he returns. If you've trained him properly he'll notify you when that happens.

 

[OLD DOMENION]

Rosie O'Donnell

Rosie O'Donnell!
Let the networks clean out their GARBAGE CAN.
What can you expect from [Rosie O'Donnell] the person who bankrupted K-Mart?

 

[Z_Infidel]

Guns aren't responsible for violent crimes.

The media, while often despicable, isn't responsible for violent crime.

The people who commit violent crimes are responsible, plain and simple. Playing DooM doesn't make someone a violent killer. Committing a crime is a choice, period.

 

[Leanwolf]

SPEER - "Doesn't Birnbaum remember Rosie trying to wallop NRA spokesman Tom Selleck into submission?

She did, too. Selleck's "performance" was just sad."

Speer, Selleck was NOT an NRA spokeman. As stated above, he was on her show to promote a flick in which he was starring.

Sad on Selleck's part??? Not hardly. The only way he might have "done combat" with her would have been to out shout and out scream and jump up and down, out curse her and maybe punch her in the nose.

That overbearing, screaming, supreme rudnik, white trash bull dyke O'Donnell is so obnoxious, overbearing, interruptive, and downright boorish, it is impossible to debate "it" in any way, shape or form.

Selleck did exactly what he should have done. He walked off the show.

L.W.

 

[History Prof]

3 Cheers for Mr Hairless!

A fantastic rebuttal.

Rebuttal? I thought it was prophecy.

 

[Roccobro]

Thank you

Simply beautiful posts Mr. Hairless. Thanks.

Justin

 

[Speer]

Speer, Selleck was NOT an NRA spokeman. As stated above, he was on her show to promote a flick in which he was starring.

You're right. I re-read the transcript. Being ambushed by an emotionally charged leftist isn't fun. I've been there. Still, I didn't expect Selleck to get so defensive over the issue, as O'Donnell's arguments were begging to be torn apart.

Selleck did exactly what he should have done. He walked off the show.

I guess maybe so.

 

[modifiedbrowning]

Speer, please see my sig line to see how Tom Selleck's performance was not sad during the Rosie debacle.