Katie Couric should be thoroughly ashamed of herself. Per the Free Beacon:

The makers of a new Katie Couric documentary on gun violence deceptively edited an interview between Couric and a group of gun rights activists in an apparent attempt to embarrass the activists, an audio recording of the full interview shows. At the 21:48 mark of Under the Gun a scene of Katie Couric interviewing members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a gun rights organization, is shown. Couric can be heard in the interview asking activists from the Virginia Citizens Defense League, “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?” The documentary then shows the activists sitting silently for nine awkward seconds, unable to provide an answer. It then cuts to the next scene.

In reality, though, the activists had immediately chimed in with a series of answers, and there had followed a debate for a good four minutes:

However, raw audio of the interview between Katie Couric and the activists provided to the Washington Free Beacon shows the scene was deceptively edited. Instead of silence, Couric’s question is met immediately with answers from the activists. A back and forth between a number of the league’s members and Couric over the issue of background checks proceeds for more than four minutes after the original question is asked.


Both the video and the audio are available here.

Let’s be clear, here: This is lying. It is dishonesty. It is, in a disfavored word, propaganda.

It is also typical. I am frequently struck by how quickly opponents of the Second Amendment resort to mendacity, conflation, and hyperbole, and this incident serves as no exception. This, I suppose, should not surprise, for such behavior is the product of intellectual and moral weakness, and the gun control movement is nothing if not intellectually and morally weak. Those who are comfortable in their arguments do not need to dissemble. Those who have the facts on their side do not need to play games. Those who are capable of debating cogently do not need to silence their opponents, nor to use trickery to make their critics look stupid. Katie Couric is not comfortable, factual, or capable.

You will note, I hope, that the answers Couric’s guests gave were not removed as a result of time constraints — had that been the case, the question would have been cut, too — but because Couric and her team wanted to give the impression that there is no answer to her question. Put bluntly, this was a setup; a game; a ploy that was intended to convey that those who oppose stricter gun control are dull and can be stumped by the simplest of inquiries.

Well, they cant. And that Couric and co. had to contrive such a moment for the cameras tells us far more about them than about those they hoped to malign.