The NRA’s Dana Loesch might be following in the footsteps of President Donald Trump. For the past few days, the spokesperson of the National Rifle Association has been hurling a series of insults at the mainstream media for reporting “fake” news.
On Friday, a Texas teenager opened fire at Santa Fe High School, killing 10 people and wounding 10 others. The mainstream media identified the 17-year-old shooter as Dimitrios “Dimitri” Pagourtzis.
Loesch took to Twitter to criticize the media for constantly naming the killer and showing his face in the video footage. The mainstream media has got to stop creating more of these “monsters” by oversaturation, she said.
“I’m not saying don’t responsibly report on things as they happen. I understand it. But constantly showing the image of the murderer, constantly saying their name, is completely unnecessary,” she added.
Twitterati, who responded to her statement, said that, as always, Loesch is playing the blame game. Some Twitter users accused her and the NRA of creating these “monsters” who shoot school students.
Similar to President Trump, Loesch retweeted several anti-NRA articles and suggested that they were “fake” news.
Does USA Today have editors? This is gibberish on several levels. pic.twitter.com/QUm7xKIe65
— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) May 19, 2018
"Where's the media on this? We haven't seen them. The media's been absent. Why? Folks sadly, because celebrating a hero and a good guy with a gun defeats the far left #MSM narrative that the gun is to blame and the gun is always a tool of evil intent." —@dbongino pic.twitter.com/ImPO3O3q6x
— NRATV (@NRATV) May 17, 2018
Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand, a grassroots organization fighting to end gun violence, said that Loesch is paid to make guns readily available to evil people. “Her entire timeline is devoted not to the victims of this tragedy, but to herself and the mean tweets she’s receiving in light of yet another mass shooting in America,” she tweeted.
A recent analysis by the Washington Post found that, in 2018, more people have been killed at schools than while serving in the U.S. military based on data from Defense Department news releases. In 2017, the number of fatalities among service members was far higher than the number of people killed in school shootings, according to the Washington Post data.
Meanwhile, the NRA is appealing a federal judge’s decision barring two 19-year-old gun enthusiasts from using pseudonyms as a way to avoid public scrutiny in a lawsuit over Florida’s new age requirements for firearms purchases.
According to Bloomberg, the NRA sued after the state’s Republican-led legislature raised the age for buying guns to 21 from 18 in response to the Parkland high school shooting in February.