Comedian Amy Schumer believes Katie Couric’s new gun control documentary should be “required viewing” — even though Couric herself has admitted that the film was selectively edited to make pro-gun advocates appear foolish.
Couric’s film, Under the Gun, has been heavily criticized for the way the Yahoo! News anchor and director Stephanie Soechtig manipulated pro-Second Amendment responses to a question posed by the journalist.
An eight-second delay was added between the time Couric asked the question and the time the responses are heard, giving the impression that gun rights proponents in the Virginia Citizens Defense League were baffled by the journalist’s gun control question.
News of the manipulative edit caught Yahoo “off guard” and caused a panic among top executives at the company, who reportedly convened an emergency meeting to discuss the film even though it was not produced by the news agency.
Couric apologized in a statement after the editing came to light.
“I regret that those eight seconds were misleading and that I did not raise my initial concerns more vigorously,” the anchor wrote in a statement. Meanwhile, director Stephanie Soechtig has said she stands by the decision to edit the film.
The fallout from the selective edit was significant. NPR criticized the decision to insert the pause, making clear it never would have released a film with such “manipulation” because it has higher standards. The public outlet explained that the decision to make respondents appear stumped “would not pass muster at NPR under its principles for fairness in handling interviews.” And MSNBC’s Morning Joe actually ridiculed the film because of its selective editing.
Of course, none of that deterred Schumer from recommending the film. The 35-year-old Trainwreck star also ended her tweet with the hashtag, “#EndGunViolence.”
That particular phrase is a rallying cry for leftists like Schumer who push universal background checks as a solution to nearly every mass shooting without stopping to think that nearly every high-profile gunman of the past 15 years passed a background check for his or her guns.
It is a rallying cry to gun control proponents, like Schumer, who rail against the gun show loophole but seemingly cannot name one high-profile shooter who bought his or her guns at a gun show. Indeed, it is a rallying cry for people who demand more gun laws every time defenseless citizens are killed, but who never stop to note that the overwhelming majority of such attacks occur in gun-free zones, where the zones render citizens defenseless.
Given that this is how Schumer thinks, it makes sense that she thought Couric’s debunked film was good.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.