Jonah Goldberg notes at National Review that “journalist” Katie Couric doesn’t have the slightest bit of shame about the fraudulent edit in her anti-gun propaganda film.

The other day, former CBS News darling Katie Couric was speaking at an event organized by something called “TheWrap.” Specifically, at its “Power Women Breakfast” in New York. (That is exactly the kind of event I’d expect Couric to be at, and I don’t even know what it is.) She was asked about the scandal swirling around her anti-gun documentary — specifically, the fact that she deceptively edited a gun-rights group’s response to a question to make the members seem like dangerous idiots. I wrote about all that in a recent column, so there’s no need to repeat myself beyond noting that Couric and her producer are guilty of outright deception. But I thought her response was amusingly revealing. “I can understand the objection of people who did have an issue about it,” Couric said. (The “it” here is the deliberate falsifying of the truth). “Having said that, I think we have to focus on the big issue of gun violence. It was my hope that, when I approached this topic, that this would be a conversation-starter.”

Let that mindset sink in folks, because it’s indicative of the wider world of mainstream journalism that Couric has inhabited her entire life. It also permeates the soul of the gun control movement, and the wider progressive political movement as a whole. There is considerable back-and-forth between the media, gun control groups, and the Democrat Party, and so I find it simpler to lump them together into the entity they really represent, the politimedia.

Those in the politimedia are people who feel morally justified in lying, cheating, defaming, libeling, and outright making things up as the go along to further their statist policy goals.

It doesn’t upset Katie Couric in the slightest that her director Stephanie Soechtig was caught red-handed making a defamatory edit. Couric admits knowing about the fraudulent edit from the earliest rough cuts of the film, and only needed the tiniest fig leaf of a lie from Soechtig to approve it. After all, the detailed four minute and 45-second response by three members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League made Couric look unprepared, shallow, and foolish. Replacing that actual response with eight seconds of dead silence filmed at the end of the interview after sound engineers asked for silence made Katie Couric look smart.

It was a no-brainer for Soechtig and Couric to make fraudulent edits to cover up uncomfortable truths in this film as it now appears that they did in their last one, Fed Up.

There’s a pervasive sickness in the politimedia (and for that matter, in the fascist “alt-right”), that holds that lies and crimes of any size or shape are acceptable as long as theses lies serve their greater political cause.

This is why news crews routinely find and glorify tiny groups of protesters to carry their views, while minimizing or ignoring crowds of thousands to tens of thousands holding differing and indeed, prevailing views.

This is why news organizations nationwide have enthusiastically embraced data from an admitted anti-gun propaganda site called Mass Shooting Tracker, and a more subtle anti-gun site, the Gun Violence Archive, which both pull from biased (and typically incompetent) mainstream media accounts for their “data”. This is why they routinely use the laughably false data on school shootings from Everytown and Moms Demand action, even when they know that that information is entirely false. It’s why they use easily debunked studies from the Violence Policy Center, a group so sloppy that they’ve insisted living people were murder victims.

The anti-gun media is the source of “data” for these anti-gun groups, who then report the work of the anti-gun groups as more news. It’s like asking child molesters to provide ratings for the child care services that they own.

We do not have a “gun violence epidemic” in this country. We don’t have a “gun violence” problem at all.

What we do have are:

A thug culture problem, where small subcultures in many communities embrace the tool of violence as a common currency. Typically, the vast majority of violence in any community can be traced back to less than 5% of the population, who are well known to police who are not allowed to put them away for good.

We have a mental health care problem which contributes to intolerable levels of suicide because people can’t get the mental health care they need.

We have a dishonesty problem that goes to the highest levels of entertainment and politics. People would rather lie (and for that matter, be deceived) than deal with uncomfortable truths that undermine their political conceits.

There are of course other problems with this sickened Republic, but these are those most closely related to the lies of those pushing the fiction of “gun violence.”

We currently have more firearms in circulation than at any point in American history, and a new record is set every single day. These firearms are being sold and used by ever more diverse groups of people. Women, youth, and urban shooters are the fastest growing groups of new gun owners, and have been consistently over the past half-decade.

And despite the number of guns in circulation, the number of new shooters, and the diversity in age, sex, race, economic status and population density of those new purchases, and rhetoric from the anti-gun media and Democrat politicians that these millions of new guns on the market each month, and the millions of new gun owners each year, what do we see?

Criminal homicides with weapons of all kinds are plummeting.

The per capita firearm homicide rate is the lowest it has ever been in recorded history of the United States.

Let that sink in, folks. The “gun violence epidemic” pushed by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, the Democrat Party, ABC News, AFP, Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, NBC News, New York Times, PolitiFact, Reuters, Snopes, USA Today, Yahoo! News, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and others is an abject and demonstrable lie, completely undone by the simple fact that the violence they claim is expanding is actually severely contracting.

Accidental deaths with firearms are plummeting as well.

They’ve declined by 61% in a decade, but you wouldn’t know it, because of how the media has changed their coverage of such events. Until very recently, an accidental death with a firearm was often either minimized or not covered in the news at all out of respect to the family’s loss. Now that left wing politicians and the media have decided that they need to manufacture a “gun violence epidemic,” these tragedies—which are rapidly declining thanks to NRA and NSSF child gun safety initiatives—are being grossly blown out of proportion to make it look like we’re having an “epidemic” of gun accidents (actually incidents of gun storage negligence) involving children, when these incidents are actually becoming increasingly rare.

You’re being lied to about guns and a non-existent “gun violence epidemic” during the most peaceful time in American history, my fellow citizens, and those lying to you aren’t the slightest bit ashamed of their lies.

Katie Couric and Stephanie Soechtig are just two symptom of a cancer infecting the elitist politimedia who shamelessly lie about firearms and violence.

Stop believing what you’re being told, and start demanding that those who so routinely lie to you be held to account.