Adam Carolla shoots his mouth off for a living but doesn’t consider himself a “gun nut.” The podcast king is still keenly aware of how mainstream media sources take aim at gun rights.
Carolla slammed news reporters this week for trying to manufacture a connection between the U.S. Navy Yard shooting and the AR-15, a semi-automatic sports rifle routinely demonized in the press. Carolla brought up the tragic shooting as well as how many media outlets incorrectly reported the shooter’s weapon–again.
“I do understand there’s a hard-left media that’s very anti automatic and assault rifle. Every time there’s a shooting just they go, ‘he had a pistol and an AR-15,’ then a day and a half later, ‘he may not have had an AR-15.’ It all goes down in our brain as, ‘oh, another AR-15’ … they want there to be an AR-15 involved with this badly, badly.”
Carolla says these incidents aren’t an accident. It’s all part of a preferred media narrative, one that shows little sign of stopping.
“This doesn’t happen in other aspects, meaning, they don’t take random … in the news, as bad as they are, they wouldn’t take random weapons and put them into people’s hands without an agenda, and if they didn’t have an agenda it wouldn’t be an AR-15 every time,” he says.
News consumers end up believing those early reports even if the outlets later retract them.
“A year from now, if you said what did the gun man use at the Naval base, you’d say AR-15,” he says.