In White Hills, Arizona, a nine-year-old girl accidentally shot a firing range instructor when he handed her an Uzi on full automatic setting and she lost control of the weapon. That was a tragedy, but there have been thousands of newsworthy tragedies in the six days since that story first appeared, and yet the media is still bombarding us with stories about it. Why?

The episode itself is not very complicated. A foolish parent allowed his daughter to use a dangerous instrumentality that was beyond her maturity level to handle, and a negligent instructor paid with his life for a moment of hideous judgment and negligence. That’s it. It’s a one day story. Today, in the category of horrible accidents involving children, we should be reading about the little girl—same age–who died on a beach yesterday when a sand hole someone had dug collapsed on her. And the most recent infant left in a car to broil to death. Yet the Sunday morning TV shows all managed to mention the shooting range incident, and today I am still seeing articles like this one. The explanation for the saturation coverage of the shooting accident is, of course, the news media’s anti-gun agenda, which, after journalists openly and unethically aligned with the anti-gun hysterics in the wake of Sandy Hook, is no longer a matter open for debate. Most were not as obnoxious and blatant about their anti-gun bias as Piers Morgan, whose obsession with the topic helped speed his demise on CNN, but the agenda was clear and obvious. The attempt to rapidly indoctrinate the American public into the idea that the Second Amendment was a virtual death warrant for innocent citizens in general and children in particular was rapidly assimilated by the schools, which ratcheted up their gun paranoia to punishing students for mentioning guns, having pictures of guns, of chewing their food into the shape of guns. The plan, you see, is to inculcate the young into being so terrified of  the mere word “gun” that the Second Amendment will be as good as gone as soon as the new generation of gun-phobics get the vote. It might work, too.

The message is simplicity itself: GUNS BAD. Thus, when the story of the unfortunate Uzi-wielding child and her victim hit the wires, it immediately became a story about how bad guns are, how we need new laws restricting the use of guns, and how children are endangered by the mere existence of guns. Then the story became about a “national debate.” Here’s the Washington Post three days ago, and four days from the incident:

“The same kind of weapon was used this week by a 9-year-old girl in the accidental killing of her instructor at an Arizona firing range, reopening the debate about children and guns and prompting questions about how much firepower is too much for young hands.”

There is no such debate, or if there is, it is so one-sided as to be pointless. How many people think Uzi’s should be placed in the hands of tiny children? The motive for staging this faux debate is to be able to hammer home the message that this tragedy was all the gun’s fault, and thus our fault for not banning the damn things. That’s the message, obvious or subliminal, from the media’s flogging this sad tale for a full week. I’m sure it works on a lot of people, just as the schools punishing a deaf child whose name in “Gunner” by banning the deaf sign language necessary for him to say his name works by attaching child abuse to anything relating to guns. Helping it work is the reliably deranged National Rifle Association, which picked two days after the shooting to tweet this..

Morons.

That does not change the fact that this is a textbook example of how the news media exceeds its authority, breaches its duty of objectivity and manipulates news stories to achieve its own political and social ends. When an Aeroflot pilot, 1n 1994, placed his 12-year-old son in the pilot seat, causing the passenger plane to crash, the subsequent coverage focused on the fatal idiocy of the pilot, who was simultaneously a reckless pilot and a terrible parent, not the danger of airplanes. Similarly, as scary as an Uzi is to some of us, this accident was not the Uzi’s fault, any more than the plane itself was responsible for the Russian air disaster. Nor were there widespread debates, here or there, about the safety of air flight and whether 12-year-olds should fly passenger jets.

The father in the shooting gallery incident was negligent, and the instructor was criminally negligent, resulting in a trauma that will haunt the young shooter for the rest of her life. A gun happened to be the instrumentality of death in this case, but it just as easily could have been anything that is dangerous in the hands of the young—a car, a speed boat, a straight-edge razor, a chain saw, a trained white tiger, a bottle of scotch, a syringe full of morphine. The difference is that in those stories, the focus would be on the reckless adults who caused the tragedy, which is exactly where it would belongs

Ah, but in the eyes of our news media, these things aren’t inherently bad. Not like guns.

GUNS BAD!