by Frank Miniter - Monday, November 14, 2016

The U.S. Bill of Rights was ratified 225 years ago next month. So here we are, two-and-a-quarter centuries later, and the so-called “mainstream” media is so opposed to our most basic right—the right to defend our own lives with the tool of individual freedom—that they are in shock that Hillary Clinton lost the election. They really can’t see or understand the 100 million-plus Americans who have chosen to take their freedom into their own hands. They can’t see them because they haven’t tried. The “mainstream” media has ideological, elitist blinders on.

This blindness has left nearly all the “mainstream” outlets asking, teary eyed, baffled beyond understanding, “How did this happen?” Why, they want to know, did so many voters in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states vote for Donald Trump?

They can’t see how Clinton’s anti-Second Amendment rhetoric and gun-control goals cost her votes from freedom-loving Americans. They can’t understand why gun owners were motivated to stop her from nominating U.S. Supreme Court justices who would likely have voted to reduce the Second Amendment to nothing more than a collective right of now historically extinct militias.

They can’t see these things because the “mainstream” media don’t send reporters to gun ranges or to the homes of women who were forced to use a firearm to defend themselves and their children from a bad guy before the police could get there. The media don't try to understand this perspective. No, it’s worse than that: They censure it. They often downplay or don’t report on these things at all.This blindness has left nearly all the “mainstream” outlets asking, teary eyed, baffled beyond understanding, “How did this happen?”

As a journalist who crosses the divide by also writing for some “mainstream” publications, I’ve found that editors in the liberal publications won’t even consider running articles that challenge their bias.

This media bias is part of the reason so many Americans are fed up. Even the extreme, anti-gun zealot and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore noticed this and warned liberals to stop ignoring so many Americans. His opinions are far off in left field, but even he noticed the forgotten, maligned Americans.

And none have been more maligned than gun owners. There are more than 100 million gun owners in America, and they are part of every demographic and region. The vast majority are good, law-abiding people who cherish their basic freedoms. Nevertheless, the “mainstream” media and elitist politicians like President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have talked down to them, mischaracterized them and treated them as intellectual inferiors who need government handlers to guide them in the right direction.

Though politicians like Clinton and Obama and many “mainstream” media members have shown, again and again, how ignorant they are of firearms, of crime statistics even from the federal agencies, and of the basis of our freedom, they act as if they know best. They are a self-described enlightened elite who, they claim via government control, can make everything better.

To many millions of Americans, it is not a shock that voters chose freedom at the hour when that freedom was about to be taken.

What is always shocking is how much the “well-educated,” the self-described media and political elite are out of touch. This is why they are really in shock on Ivy League campuses and in newsrooms throughout the country. They are stupefied as a result of their own ignorance. Some are seeking therapy. To them, I say, go and non-judgmentally speak to Americans who have a different view than the one you see on CNN or The New York Times editorial page. Open your minds to them, and the shock will be gone as you begin to understand what just happened.

If journalists in the “mainstream” newsrooms would only do that, just imagine the steps America could take forward. Imagine what such journalists could learn if they would only challenge their points of view on guns. Imagine how much that could do to heal the partisan divide.

To many millions of Americans, it is not a shock that voters chose freedom at the hour when that freedom was about to be taken.Even if the often elitist, liberal “mainstream” media continues to refuse to do this, and instead continues to only characterize America’s gun owners as they have, there is now a large and growing alternative media that, in a free market, will continue to push them further into irrelevancy.

So does this mean that, as time passes, there will more and more be a media for one party and a different media for the other? Does the divide simply grow wider over time? Is that our future?

I don’t think so, as reckonings like this election do tend to force even the “mainstream” media out of their ideological comfort zone. Meanwhile, A1F Daily, NRA News, Fox News and many more are reporting the stories the liberal media purposely ignore.

With the First Amendment helping people to understand the Second Amendment as it rarely has before, I see hope.

Also, this election does present an opportunity to settle much of the gun debate with real, pro-freedom solutions that can make America an even safer nation. What gun owners need to do now is to stay involved and to be decent to those who have thus far failed to open themselves to the freedom point of view. Help them understand. From that will come a much less divided and better America, despite whatever some media outlets do.

Frank Miniter is a frequent A1F Daily contributor and the author of the book This Will Make a Man of You—One Man’s Search for Hemingway and Manhood in a Changing World