-By Warner Todd Huston

It’s obvious that most articles about guns in the media are biased against our Second Amendment rights, certainly. Many are at least biased in that their facts and terminology are so badly garbled that incorrect analysis results. But a recent piece in a British newspaper is the most blatantly biased I’ve seen in some time.

For the British Express, hack writer Oli Smith uncorked a piece on the controversial proposal to allow a mosque to be built in Newton County, Georgia, that is so filled with lies, scare words, and hyperbole that it is impossible to believe it is being presented as a “news” story instead of left-wing, invective-filled opinion piece.

The lies begins right in the headline: “Armed militia storm council meeting after right-wing anger over Muslim plan for mosque.”



Right there in the title is a lie. No one “stormed” any meeting. The group opposing the mosque had announced far ahead of time that they intended to protest against the proposal to build a mosque. It was a planned protest, not a “storming” which in this context would denote that there was a sudden, unexpected rush to attack the meeting built of extreme emotion.

The Second line of the story contained a lie meant to scare readers, as well:

The violent group of right-wing protesters carried guns into a local square to demonstrate against “the presence of Muslims” in the country

What “violet group” is this cretin talking about? There was no violence. The people who stood against the mosque gathered to peacefully — though forcefully — oppose the proposal. They held a vigil and carried signs but no one was hurt and nothing was damaged by their presence.

The county meeting was canceled with the council members citing their worries over the protesters, that much is true. But there was NO violence beforehand. None.

A little later the writer lied about what sort of firearms the locals were toting during the protest.

Following this, nearly 30 members of the armed militia stormed the local town centre armed with machine guns, forcing the mosque meeting to be cancelled.

Obviously this is a lie. There were no “machine guns” being bandied about during the protest. After all, machine guns are essentially illegal in the U.S.

But, in fact, even if you just take for granted that the writer is simply too stupid to know a semi-automatic rifle from a “machine gun,” the sentence still makes it seem as if 30 people armed with these scary guns “stormed” the meeting. But other reports that reported, you know, ACTUAL FACTS, make the scary guns seem far less alarming.

Take the report from WXIA, for instance. Here is how they reported the protesters and the guns they brought to the vigil:

About two dozen members of the armed militia showed up for the protest. Seen among the members were two AR-15s, a few handguns and megaphone.

That is a far cry from “30 members of the armed militia stormed the local town centre armed with machine guns.”

Next this Express screed characterized the tiny number of people there to support the mosque in exactly the opposite terms it used to characterize the anti-mosque protesters.

One local resident among the peaceful counter-protesters at the town centre hit back.

Note how the Muslim supporters were generously called “peaceful”? Of course, the anti-mosque protesters were ALSO peaceful, but they were characterized as “violent” when in fact they weren’t violent in any way at all.

Finally, the leader of the group protesting the mosque was called a “gang leader” in this piece of garbage excuse for reporting.

Nearly every word in this screed is warped to make the peaceful anti-mosque protesters seem like a machine gun-wielding, violent crowd of hate-filled bigots. But in reality the protest was entire peaceful, there were few firearms being brandished (and it isn’t likely any were even loaded), and no one was indulging “hate” but were on the contrary expressing serious concerns in light of the near daily acts of Muslim terrorism across the world.

This junk is what the Express wanted to pass off as “reporting,” but was in fact an anti-gun agenda-pushing piece of garbage filled with lies.

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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”

–Samuel Johnson

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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as Constitution.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.

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