The media attacks on the NRA and the air rifle club at Stoneman Douglas High have now boomeranged.

Back in February, the Associated Press led the media horde in an attack on the air rifle team at the high school because… *gasp*… the NRA gave them grant money.

Let me unpack how the media translated that grant money: NRA gave money to an air rifle club = the NRA trained Cruz to kill.

This smear of the NRA and the students of the school came on the heels of media outlets taking the word of a convicted felon that Cruz was a member of a white supremacist group.

AP Exclusive: Florida school shooting suspect competed with an air-rifle marksmanship team supported by an NRA grant. https://t.co/4TWKuUIgjV — The Associated Press (@AP) February 16, 2018

This kind of media activism deserves the tar and feathering it received.

AP is holding their own beer. AP Yesterday: Let’s publish the lies of a convicted white supremacist felon without verifying his claims that will later turn out to be absolute BS. AP today: Let’s smear the JROTC and NRA to cover our tracks! https://t.co/05uFHSbnG4 — A.P. Dillon (@APDillon_) February 17, 2018

The smear is still out there but as it turns out, Cruz had been banned from the JROTC air rifle club 18 months before Cruz went on his rampage.

Sun Sentinal reported that Cruz was banned because “staff were so worried about his fascination with guns that they banned him from practicing shooting skills with the JROTC.”

Some media outlets are still trying to make the ‘evil NRA is in your schools’ narrative happen. Here’s one at WUNC and another at the News and Observer.

Neither of them links to the actual data they reference, but I will.

Here’s the 2016 NRA Foundation report. You’ll find North Carolina’s $458,785 worth of grants to dozens and dozens of organizations and school districts on page 14.