Guns have become an important issue for Barack Obama’s campaign. Starting around the Pennsylvania primary, Obama and his campaign surrogates began strenuously assuring gun owners that he supports gun ownership, and it appears to be paying off. A poll in August showed that John McCain only led Obama among hunters by only 14 percentage points, just about half the 27-point lead that President Bush held over John Kerry in 2004. If McCain had a similar lead, he would be ahead in most polls, particularly in many battle ground states.
This past weekend, Joe Biden campaigned in southwest Virginia calling any notion that Obama wanted to take away people’s guns “malarkey.” Brian Schweitzer, Montana Democratic governor, previously told reporters that Obama "Ain't ever going to take your gun away." Obama regularly makes similar statements -- at least about rifles and shotguns.
Yet, the NRA, which has given the voting records of both Obama and Biden an “F” rating, has a quite different view, and has started a $15 million ad campaign to warn people about what it regards as Obama’s and Biden’s records. One mailer from the NRA says, "Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American history."
Critical news stories have been run on the NRA’s ads in the Washington Post, FactCheck.org, CNN, and many other places. ABC’s Jake Tapper and CBS’s Brian Montopoli posted stories that merely stated what the NRA ads said.
The Washington Post describes its own Fact Checker report as giving the NRA “spot three out of four Pinocchios for its claims that Obama would take away guns and ammunition used by hunters.”
The Dallas Morning News describes FactCheck.org as saying that “NRA ads and mailers that say Obama wants to ban handguns, hunting ammo and use of a gun for home defense are false.”
CNN labeled the ads as “Misleading” and claimed that “While Obama has supported some measures to limit gun rights, he has backed nothing on the scale suggested in the ad.”
Brooks Jackson, who authored the FactCheck.org piece with D'Angelo Gore, was extremely upset about the NRA ads. Jackson told FOX News that: “They are lying. This is what they do. This is how they make their money. Do these people have no shame? They are just making this up. I just wish that they would tell the truth.” He said that their ads were “one of the worst examples of lying” that he had “ever seen.”
But what are the facts? . . .
