It must be an election year. One way you can tell for sure is that the media has stepped up its push to convince everyone that gun control is actually a great idea which most people support and the NRA is basically an offshoot of the Church of Satan. We have yet another example of this phenomenon on tap as the Today Show’s Katie Couric prepares to unveil her new “documentary” titled “Under the Gun.” She sat down with her colleague Matt Lauer to talk about it on Friday and set the tone by tossing out a set of claims which were startling to say the least. The interview runs a bit over four minutes in length.

AWR Hawkins at Breitbart flagged this segment for us and provides a bit of the flavor that we can expect from this hard hitting piece of journalism. (To put it kindly.)

Couric undertook a gun control documentary, “Under the Gun,” and says that in interviewing people for the film, she came to the conclusion that the NRA really does not speak for the majority of gun owners. She said, “The NRA only represents five percent of gun owners, so there’s this huge silent majority, and they represent common ground.”

Couric claims that that “common ground” is support for the same kind of background checks that have been demonstrable failures in California, Colorado, Washington state, and Paris, France.

This series of interviews by Couric where she “embeds” (her word, not mine) with families who are speaking out against the Second Amendment relies on many of the same polls and statistics which Democratic candidates and Michael Bloomberg funded groups generally rely on for propaganda purposes without looking into the issue beyond the surface. It’s true that you can easily construct a poll which asks if Americans believe that people should go through a background check before purchasing a weapon and find a large majority answering in the affirmative. (Respondents are rarely asked to weigh in on the fact that virtually all legal gun sales in this country already require such a check or that criminals don’t tend to buy their weapons at Dick’s Sporting Goods.)

In addition to the normal “think of the children” exhortations, Couric decides to go after the usual bugaboo of the Left, that being the National Rifle Association. As Hawkins points out, Katie tosses out the hugely deceptive remark that the NRA only represents five percent of gun owners. Such figures are frequently deployed when gun rights opponents seek to marginalize or discredit the NRA, but the statistic in question only refers to gun owners who are active, dues paying members. (Disclosure: The author is a member.)

But what does the word “represent” mean in this context? Is it the people who shell out the money for a membership and attend sponsored events or are we talking about the people who approve of the NRA and agree with their goals and basic philosophy? If you agree that the obvious meaning is the latter, Couric would do well to note that the public’s feelings about the National Rifle Association are warm and fuzzy compared to most anyone else on the playing field. (Washington Examiner)

Despite a crush of criticism from the Democratic party, its presidential candidates and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lavish spending on anti-gun groups, the National Rifle Association is enjoying near record high approval ratings and its best-ever “very favorable” in a new Gallup poll.

The poll said that the NRA has experienced a three-year popularity jump and now has a 58 percent favorability rating in the United States. It has been higher only once in the last 26 years, 60 percent in 2005.

Getting a thumbs up from nearly 60% of Americans about anything these days is nigh onto impossible. President Obama is currently enjoying some of the highest approval ratings he’s seen since his first month in office and he’s still well shy of that mark. For that matter, the NRA’s approval rating is nearly 20% higher than that of the media which reports on the group. (That would be your cue to take a look in the mirror, Ms. Couric.) And if we really want to get into the sophomoric game of seeing how many Americans are “represented” by particular groups based on those voting with their wallets, how about Planned Parenthood? Details of their donors are rather closely guarded, but should we define their representative status by their overall approval marks or just the number of people who actually send them a check every year. That would make for an intriguing analysis.

The NRA represents the values and opinions of far more people than do gun grabbing groups. This sort of dishonest politicking in the guise of media coverage does no service to anyone.