"The Second Amendment is under threat like never before," presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said last Friday at a National Rifle Association event. "Crooked Hillary is the most anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment candidate. She wants to take your guns away from you, just remember that." Later in the speech, he added:

"The Second Amendment is on the ballot in November. The only way to save our Second Amendment is to vote for a person that you all know named Donald Trump."

Earl Blumenauer listened to Trump make these assertions in a National Public Radio report and was appalled. But the Democratic congressman from Oregon wasn't just disgusted by Trump's outlandish claims about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner. He was annoyed by how NPR handled the story. In a post on Medium, Blumenauer wrote that the radio report opened with "Donald Trump's announcement at the NRA convention that Hillary Clinton was determined to eliminate the Second Amendment. This was followed, I suppose in an attempt at balance, by a segment that described Hillary Clinton meeting with victims of gun violence and talking about her commitment to its reduction." Blumenauer continued:

Earl Blumenauer

"Treating these two political statements essentially as equivalent was journalistic malpractice. In what alternative universe is there any chance that anyone could repeal the Second Amendment? Put aside for a moment the fact that there is absolutely no evidence in Hillary Clinton's four decades of politics and public service that there has even been a hint of such a plan, which would be worthy of journalistic analysis, but how would it even be possible in the first place? How could a president get legislation amending the U.S. constitution, which would require a supermajority of the House and the Senate, through Congress? Put aside the fact that you couldn't overcome the filibuster; even if it were voted on, where are the votes? What states are going to ratify this? This is an insane statement that NPR simply accepted and moved on to Hillary Clinton's position, as opposed to treating it like the crazy lie that it is."

Blumenauer has a point. At times, news organizations, even very good ones like NPR, let untrue or outrageous statements go unchallenged, figuring there just isn't the time or space to pick apart every single thing a candidate says.

But journalists have not abdicated their responsibility in this election season. The Pulitzer Prize-winning politics fact-checker PolitiFact, for example, has tracked Trump's highest profile statements as a presidential candidate and found that only 8 percent of them qualify as "true" or "mostly true." More than 60 percent have been found to be "false" or, worse still, "pants on fire."

Polls indicate voters are generally aware of Trump's fraught relationship with the truth. And yet ... a lot of them don't seem to care. In a new ABC-Washington Post poll, 46 percent of respondents plan to vote for Trump even though 58 percent consider him unqualified to be president. Ninety-two percent of self-identified conservative Republicans in the survey prefer Trump over Clinton, while 22 percent of those in this category consider him unqualified for the job. Partisanship, it's clear, can be more powerful than facts.

Of course, many voters will read this and say, "But what about Clinton? Doesn't she lie all the time too?" PolitiFact has found 50 percent of her statements to be "true" or "mostly true"; 14 percent are labeled "false" or "pants on fire." The comments section below no doubt will soon offer many examples of the latter -- some of them might even be true.

-- Douglas Perry