Washington Post (9/9/19)

This week on CounterSpin: If you look, you can find reminders that the Second Amendment was forged, distressingly, with the aim of preserving “slave patrol” militias in the South. And that courts consistently interpreted it as meaning a “collective” right of the states; only after a concerted, well-heeled effort was it read as ensuring an “individual” right to ownership of all kinds of guns—which means that when media lazily point to “Second Amendment rights,” they’re tacitly endorsing a particular interpretation. That the history around gun policy is a living history is important, because when US news media move from reporting terrible incidents to hosting debate on policy responses, they can slide into an enervating picture of this country’s unparalleled gun violence as lamentable, but legal, so what are you gonna do? They may as well reprint the Onion headline from years ago: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

On this as on a number of issues, many are simply fed up with the idea that change is too hard. Will media conversation shift to keep up with them? We’ll talk with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns.

(CNN/Media Education Foundation)

Also on the show: We’ve just marked the 18th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and US corporate media could not care less. Iraqis still suffer from decades of war, sanctions, displacement and disease, but so far out of US of media’s range has the country fallen that, when Biden bombed Syria on February 25, it was reported as “Biden’s First Military Action,” even though the US carried out an airstrike in Iraq just days into office. Part of the reason media are comfortable putting the Iraq War in the rear view is that they’re comfortable in the story they’ve settled on, that it was all a tragic mistake. But lies don’t become truth on repetition. We’ll hear a bit of an early 2004 conversation with journalist Robert Dreyfuss just to remind us of that.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.