A dragon made with plastic cutlery. Amazing.

PS: In England it is considered an Assault Rifle.

I keep mention The Narrative and then find myself searching online to find the quote from Stephen Hunter’s book I, Sniper.  So I went ahead and created my own post so I don’t have to go crazy next time.

You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything.
—
The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we will tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they’ve chosen to live their lives. It’s a way of arranging things a certain way that they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama is a saint. They know communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They know that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was fucked up…. Cheney’s a devil. Biden’s a genius. Soft power good, hard power bad. Forgiveness excellent, punishment counterproductive, capital punishment a sin.
—
And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don’t even know they’re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin’-stroy anybody who makes them question that….

The family of 24-year-old Jessica Ghawi, a victim in the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, is faced with more than $200,000 in legal costs after a federal judge ordered them to pay attorney’s fees for four ammunition dealers the family attempted to sue.“They have taken our daughter, and now they want to take our worldly goods,” Lonnie Phillips told MSNBC’s Tamron Hall in a televised interview earlier this week. “I think that’s a little much.”

Source: Family to Pay Price for Trying to Sue Ammo Dealers | NBC Bay Area

We have seen this already, but something in this particular news item caught the attention of Blog Reader Jay H: No mention of the Brady Campaign involvement in the lawsuit. Zip, nada.

Now jay being the forward fellow he is, contacted Sam Brock, one of the people involved in writing the story:

From: James Hafemeister [mailto:jayh@????.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 01, 2015 11:13 AM
To: Brock, Samuel (NBCUniversal)
Subject: PLCAA Story

Mr. Brock,
I saw your story on the family who sued Lucky Gunner ammo sales. I was surprised that you made no mention of The Brady Campaign’s role in this lawsuit.
It seems, to me, that the Brady Center pressed this family to peruse this lawsuit and is now leaving them to pay the debt.
Did you not know about the Brady Center’s involvement? Or did you just choose to not report it?

Here’s their press release.
http://www.bradycampaign.org/press-room/brady-center-sues-online-sellers-of-ammunition-and-equipment-used-in-aurora-movie-theater

And here are screenshots in case they pull the press release down.

And Mr. Brock responded.

From: “Brock, Samuel (NBCUniversal)” <Samuel.Brock@nbcuni.com>
Date: August 3, 2015 at 12:24:03 CDT
To: James Hafemeister <jayh@????.com>
Subject: RE: PLCAA Story

Good morning Mr. Hafemeister,

Thank you for your thoughtful email regarding our story.

To answer your question, yes we were aware that the Brady Campaign funded the family’s efforts (and likely encouraged them) to challenge the Colorado gun laws.

We chose not to report it because the Brady Campaign wasn’t named as one of the plaintiffs, per the judge’s ruling to dismiss.

That said, I wish we had made mention of it in our story. I agree it is relevant to the overall discussion. We reached out to the Brady Center and specifically asked them *why they would provide legal counsel for the case, but not pick up the attorneys’ fees after the dismissal. They never responded to our request…and I think I should have outlined that lack of response in our piece.

Appreciate hearing Sent from my iPhone

Regards,

Sam

Kudos to Mr. Brock for answering the email. I had a couple of experiences with journalists caught with a bad article and I am still waiting for a reply.

That being said, I am sorry but I am not buying the “They weren’t named” excuse. The point of the report is to make the Phillips look like they were run over first by the ammunition distributors and then by a judge with a heartless decision. Simply a televised Pity Party. In fact, a cursory Google search would have provided Mr. Brock with this result: A Linkedin profile of Mr. Phillips.

And last: We have seen plenty of corrections being made after a story originally was posted online, that is the beauty of the Interwebs. Yet this has not been done even after Jay’s email and admission by Mr. Brock that they screwed up.

Maybe is the location where Mr. Brock works: San Francisco/Bay area, home of our eternally beloved Dianne Feinstein who rates 100% with the Brady Campaign on Gun Control.

Or maybe I am just imagining things…..

Here we go again.

A bit more subtle this time, but not that much. Quicken Loans Arena does prohibit firearms in its property, but they have been doing so for a long while now and it is not as Shannon’s Media Minion suggests, for the GOP debates.

And obviously, neither Fox nor the GOP had to do anything with that internal decision by QLA, but Moms Demand have never been shy about lying before, so why stop now. And I bet if you ask them directly, they will come out and say that Fox and the GOP could have asked QLA to relinquish the prohibition but since they didn’t do so, they approved it for this event. Yeah, they are mentally twisted that way.

And what is the perception among their followers? Did they take the bait?

I think that hook was set somewhere in their collective lower intestines they swallowed so hard.

One again: If your cause is so righteous, why lie?

Caught this not so veiled request for money.

And what also struck me as interesting (and damned proof of Astroturfing) was that after 41 minutes, they only had 2 (two) replies, none saying they contributed and one complaining about the racial profile of the group.  Usually when the post something, the replies are almost immediate and plentiful, specially if they can insult and threaten Gun Owners. But when they ask for money, they get crickets and a Social Justice Warrior, no cash.

We’ll see what happens…

And probably somebody will say and do something stupid which will force me to blog.

In the meantime I’ll be on my bean bag chair, eating Cheetos and watching something on TV not preacher.

😀