I'd never seen this before.
Exactly one week ago I wrote a piece right here at Not the Bee detailing the glorious contributions that the "Community Notes" section of Elon Musk's "X" platform (formerly known as Twitter) has provided. Where journalists and information gatekeepers used to spread half-truths and misleading storylines with impunity, now people are able to fact-check the "experts."
Little did I know at the time, but within the week I would witness something I had never seen before: users "community noting" a left-wing anti-gun account into oblivion on multiple tweets in the same thread.
Following the tragic shooting spree in Maine, conducted by a mentally deranged military man, some outfit called the "K-12 School Shooting Database" put out a stunningly uninformed "analysis" on X. Community Notes had something to say about it:
(Editor's Note: The .308 Winchester is a popular hunting round that was standard issue for the US military until several decades after WWII. I can find no indication that it is banned for hunting deer in Maine. It is a popular caliber on surveys of Maine hunters. Comparisons between calibers with words like "more powerful and deadly" are meaningless without actual measurements of velocity and energy.)
Community note in case it disappears:
The shirt:
The note:
Personally, I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that bit about the "far-right anti-government imagery." I can only assume that the operators of this "K-12 School Shooting Database" account were confusing Ben Franklin's "Join or Die" cartoon with the Gadsden "Don't tread on me" flag. Regardless, Franklin's cartoon was meant to entice the disparate English colonies to join together to fight the French on behalf of the British government at the start of the French and Indian War in 1754. I suppose you can call that an innocent mistake if you want to, but it's not.
It's actually a careless mistake that was made by activists far more committed to their political cause than they are truth or accuracy. That's the glaring credibility problem that the gun control crowd has created for itself. They've let emotionally driven reactionaries and undisciplined activist-types become their spokesmen and policy experts.
- Lazy college kids may reference clown shows like "K-12 School Shooting Database" (perhaps assuming that its serious-sounding name confers reliability)…
- Teenagers, and adults who wish they were teenagers, may retweet Shannon Watts and Moms Demand…
- Those who get their news from BuzzFeed or TikTok will be impressed by the observations of David Hogg…
But rational, thinking people see through it. They know our problems with violence are not going to be solved with additional laws - and certainly not with laws written by people who can't take the time to fact-check their own tweet thread before publishing misinformation.
They know that while Watts, Moms Demand, Hogg, and this "Database" operation may be sincere in their expressed desire to save people's lives, sincerity isn't accuracy.
They know instinctively what The Washington Post (of all places) begrudgingly admitted almost a decade ago:
In case you didn't read the story, evidence shows that only 18% of all gun crimes are being committed by legal gun owners in America. In other words, confiscate every weapon belonging to law-abiding citizens, and 82% of gun crimes would persist.
They know that the gun control crowd is consistently, almost without exception, utterly silent when asked to name what specific gun law would prevent the kinds of atrocities we just witnessed in Maine.
They know that the impulse to want to do something is good and pure. But just doing anything for the sake of doing something? That's the mentality of fools.
