December 2012 Standing Guard: The Truth You’re Not Allowed to Know

By Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President

The press’s job is to stand in the ramparts and protect the liberty and freedom of all of us from a government and from organized governmental power.

“When they desert those ramparts … and become active participants … and decide … what truth that you may know, as an American, and what truth you are not allowed to know, they have, then, made themselves a fundamental threat to the democracy, and, in my opinion, made themselves the enemy of the American people. These people are going to destroy freedom in America.”

Those words are from Pat Caddell, Democratic pollster turned political analyst, speaking on “The Audacity of Corruption” before a September 2012 Accuracy in the Media conference.

Specifically, Caddell was referring to the complicity of the national media in covering up President Barack Obama’s disastrous policies in the Middle East that culminated in the assassination of our ambassador to Libya by Islamic jihadi terrorists.

But Caddell could well have been talking about the media’s blanket of lies hiding the scandalous “Fast and Furious”—the U.S. Justice Department’s guns-to-Mexico smuggling operation that sent thousands of illegally obtained firearms to the world’s most ruthless and violent criminals: the Mexican drug cartels.

Take note that I didn’t use the media’s characterization that the scheme was “failed,” or “botched.”The government-approved scheme wasn’t “botched” at all. Neither did it “go horribly wrong.” It was by design “horribly wrong.”

The “truth you are not allowed to know” is that the Obama administration’s sanctioned “gun-walking” scheme was an evil success—through body counts that bolstered the media-charged campaign to empower Obama’s ever-hungry gun-ban bureaucracy and its zealots to enact more misguided gun laws.

The media chorus blaming our freedom started the minute President Obama stepped into the White House. Remember all that “news” that 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexican drug violence “originated” in the U.S.?

Originated? Try, “Made in the USA.”

With the media collusion, that morphed into the big lie: that regulated U.S. retailers in border states were the source of Mexican cartel guns. The trouble with that official lie was that there was only one way to make it appear truthful.

It was Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s version of the Obama campaign slogan, “Yes We Can!” with guns easily moved into Mexico through this government-supervised, taxpayer-funded smuggling operation violating numerous U.S. and Mexican laws.

Honest Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE) agents—the men who blew the whistle on government criminality—said their supervisors celebrated each time one of their guns showed up at a Mexican crime scene.

With an increasing body count, the media demanded more restrictions on our rights. And BATFE was rewarded for its deadly Mexican murder complicity with more funding from Nancy Pelosi’s Congress.

Murdered, assassinated Mexicans—hundreds of tragic, violent deaths—were just fodder for the media propaganda.

Then came the loss of one life in Arizona, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, gunned down in an ambush by armed illegal aliens in a remote border canyon. Guns at the scene were among those “walked” under “Fast and Furious.” Like the tragedy in Libya, the story was just another of Obama’s “bumps in the road.”

There are a few notable exceptions among the national media, such as Sharyl Attkisson, the intrepid CBS correspondent, the Fox News Channel and The Los Angeles Times.

But overwhelmingly, the horrifying revelations produced by the dogged efforts of U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa and U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley never existed in national media coverage.

Because of his cover-up of “Fast and Furious,” U.S. Attorney General Holder was found in criminal contempt of Congress. Yet this constitutional crisis was a blip, if covered at all.

Most recently when Univision, the Spanish language network, broadcast a painstaking, graphic investigation, its shocking revelations received scant notice from the media elites. Univision documented the use of “Fast and Furious” guns by cartel hit men in the cold-blooded slaughter of 16 teenagers and the wounding of 12 others attending a Juarez birthday party in 2010, and their use by assassins who brutally murdered the brother of a former state attorney general. Further, Univision “identified a total of 57 more previously unreported firearms that were bought by straw purchasers monitored by ATF during ‘Fast and Furious,’ and then recovered in Mexico sites related to murders, kidnappings, and at least one other massacre.”

The father of a murder victim in Mexico said Americans are “not often moved by the pain of those outside (their country) … But they are moved by the pain of their own. Well, turn around and look at the massacred.” Only with thorough prosecutions will justice prevail.

In all of this, there is something you can do that the media can’t ignore or bury. Demand absolute accountability by urging Congress to create an office of special prosecutor for “Fast and Furious.” Only when this happens will the stark truth be laid out for all to see and in Pat Caddell’s terms can “we maintain a free democracy.” Amen.