Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

out the Wall Street Journal's coverage of the Brady Bill debate. The Brady Bill, which passed
in late 1993 and took effect in early 1994, required background checks and a five-day waiting
period for gun purchasers.
As I suspected, the journal opposed Brady and the assault weapons ban. But what I
wanted to talk to Gigot about was the tone of the anti-gun control editorials. For example, in
their January 26, 1994, piece, the Journal wrote, "An awful lot of innocent Americans have
had to be robbed, beaten, stabbed, raped, tortured, and murdered to arrive at the point where a
Bill Clinton could feel compelled to get tough on crime."
I hope I'm not being overly partisan in suggesting that this was maybe just the slightest
bit unfair to Clinton, who ran on an anticrime platform, announced in his first State of the
Union address his intention to put one hundred thousand more police on the street, and successfully
fought to reduce crime every single year of his presidency.
The Journal's December 10, 1993, editorial was no kinder to "liberals" in general: "To
date, their outrage over violent deaths has been a pose." Ouch! They nailed us there. I personally
remember expressing mock outrage in 1993 over a brutal bludgeoning in Missouri I had
read about. But I was really just posturing to make it seem like I was a decent person with
actual feelings for human beings.
So what did the Journal editorial page say about gun control while it was being debated?
In May of 1994, the editorial page wrote, "Democrats in Washington are bursting their
buttons over two big contributions to the war on crime: Enacting the Brady Bill and voting in
the House recently for a ban on 'assault weapons.' We're not impressed."
They spent most of the editorial questioning the feasibility and constitutionality of
Brady and pointing out that "assault weapons" are "used in less than 1% of crime." 1
Then the Journal concluded with a challenge: "Democrats now think that with their
bans they have 'done something' about crime. We hope someone will be keeping score on the
results."
1
Not "violent crime," but "crime." Since roughly 43 million crimes were committed in 1993, this means that,
using their logic, assault weapons were used in up to forty-three thousand crimes that year. Even assuming that
in, say, half of those forty thousand crimes, the assault weapon was merely brandished and not fired, that's still a
lot of scary shit going down. (Their logic is wrong—assault weapons were used in less than 1 percent of gun
crimes.)