Under the Gun (2016) Reviews

• Unethical journalism: Couric alters words of VCDL members

  jbusch88992016-05-24

  Poster's Note: This is an edited for content email received from Phillip VanCleave,President of the Virginia Citizens Defense League. I have permission to use such. "Creative" editing by Katie Couric, has intentionally and significantly changed the response of VCDL members in a new video called "Under the Gun" - and I have PROOF. VCDL APPROACHED TO BE PART OF A "DOCUMENTARY" I received an email in March of 2015 from Kristin Lazure, a producer for Atlas Films, asking if VCDL would be part of "a documentary about the gun violence prevention movement in America." In the email, Kristin said, "Some of the story lines we're exploring include the legislative process on the federal and state level, how the Second Amendment has been interpreted in the wake of the Supreme Court's Heller ruling, and what impact mass shootings like Aurora and Sandy Hook have on gun reform legislation." She continued, "In order to fully understand the complexities of this hot button topic and speak to an audience with varied viewpoints, Ms. Couric is very eager to include all perspectives in this discussion." As is VCDL's general policy with the media, we do our best to accommodate their requests, as it gives us a chance to get our message out to the public. It is a policy that has worked well for as long as VCDL has been around, with the exception of four times, and this was to be one of those exceptions. THE "DOCUMENTARY" TURNS OUT TO BE AN "INFOMERCIAL" FOR GUN CONTROL While the movie claims to be a documentary, it's clear after watching it that it was never intended to be a balanced presentation of the issues. People from other gun groups were also interviewed, but in the end the video dedicated a mere fifteen minutes or so to the pro-self-defense side (of which VCDL had only about four minutes), while giving an hour and a half to the antis. CREATIVE EDITING BY KATIE COURIC CHANGES THE VCDL GROUP'S ANSWER TO A KEY QUESTION Katie apparently wasn't getting anything from either the group or me that she could use to further her pro-gun-control arguments. In fact my entire two-hour interview was left on the cutting room floor, but some of the group interview made it into the final film. However, one of the question/answer responses was altered - and therein lies the problem. Watching the video, you hear Katie ask, "If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorist from walking into, say, a licensed gun dealer and purchasing a gun?" The camera then shows the group members TOTALLY SILENT FOR EIGHT SECONDS. The camera zooms in on one member, who looks down. The clear implication is that none of the group had an answer for that question and was being evasive and avoiding eye contact. The truth is, and as you will hear in the audio, below, that the group responded to Katie immediately, with answers to her question! Yet the video shows no one responding. Clearly, when Katie didn't get the answer(s) she wanted, she changed the group's answers by replacing them with other video of the group sitting around quietly between questions. Unbelievable. And extremely unprofessional. In essence Katie lied about the VCDL members' answers. If she so cavalierly lied in this instance, what other things did she alter in this movie or any of her previous reporting to advance her own personal agendas? While I am used to our side being given less time in the press than the antis are given, I'm not used to having our words changed. That is a big journalistic "no no." Back in 1993, Dateline faked an accidental explosion of a truck to show that model truck was dangerous if involved in a collision. Dateline couldn't actually create an explosion by crashing vehicles into the truck, so they ultimately, and shamefully, planted incendiary devices on the truck to force it to blow up. What Katie did is similar. Speaking of cheerleading for gun control, at the end of the infomercial the names of eight anti-self-defense groups that participated in the project are prominently listed under the title of "Join Those Already Making a Difference," with viewers encouraged to contact them for more information. Not one single pro-self-defense group, including VCDL, is listed as a source of information. The audio of the full group interview is here, skip to the 36 minute and 43 second mark to hear the question on felons and the answers the group provided. There is no silence, but Katie needed something to show gun owners are unreasonable in their opposition to universal background checks, so she provided eight seconds of silence for us: http://vcdl.org:80/resources/Media/katiecouricinterview06182015.mp3 As an FYI, my full interview (raw) can be heard here: http://vcdl.org:80/resources/Media/PVCInterview_1.mp3

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• False Advertising

  tkzarf2016-05-15

  Leaving the politics out of it, the makers of this are claiming to present a balanced view. It is typical of American rhetoric and the creation of propaganda disguised as fact. Emotional response (and I do empathize with many of the traumatized people that helped create this "documentary") is the most frequently used tool in this film to present opinion, and any facts are only skewed to represent one side of the discussion. One-sided political rhetoric, which persistently portrays opposition as ignorant, is one of the reasons there is a powerful ultra-right movement. Strong enough perhaps to take control of all our government. The film does not give equal time, nor give credence, to any opposing viewpoint. It portrays all gun owners as a shill for a political lobby and demonizes, yes, you guessed it, commerce. If you are an anti-gun activist, you will walk away from this statement feeling warm and fuzzy. If you believe in gun ownership, you may sprain an ankle getting to the phone to call the NRA membership line. There was no balance, very little fact, no intelligent debate. This will only polarize two already polarized groups. It would have been interesting to see balanced. This wasn't interesting.

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• Whoopsie daisy

  d_rwc2016-05-25

  Stephanie Soechtig got caught. LOL. I guess the documentary was so bad that she needed to 'spice it up' by adding some fiction to the film. Just search "audio shows Katie Couric gun documentary deceptively edited interview pro gun activists" and you'll see how this 'film' represents the worst of the documentary genre. Stephanie you have a responsibility to at least pretend to represent the story in a minimally truthful manner. Just how many other edits did you make to spice things up? When did it become OK to release a 'documentary' that was as much fantasy as fact? It reminds me of the '80's when NBC used model rocket engines to set fire to a car so they could prove the point of their story, that the car was a fire hazard. Good luck on your future films. Now any documentary you make will be suspect.

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• An edited lie

  blacksacrednight2016-05-25

  At 21:48 Couric is made to appear as if she has stumped the Virginia Citizens Defense League by asking the question, "If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?" Subsequent to this question, the camera pans from VCDF member to member and all appear to be mesmerized by this question. Problem is, the editor of the film removed their verbose answers to this question, and inserted film of them patiently waiting to be asked a question. If this is an example of what Couric considers journalistic integrity, then she will always be remembered as a hack propagandist rather than a serious investigative reporter.

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• Nothing more than AgitProp and AtsroTurf

  matrixdragon862016-05-23

  This sear piece is the polar opposite of what its creators and its supporters say it is. It is not informative. It is not even all that dramatic. It is, especially, completely unimportant and thankfully rather forgettable. The only things Katie Couric managed to accomplish is to remove all doubt of her demonstrable, willful ignorance. Playing soundbites from her opposition to set up Straw Man fallacies to knock them down with harrowing anecdotes - not data - is yellow journalism at its worst, and that's exactly what we have here. Moreover, there was a four-hour interview with John Lott, who has repeatedly and thoroughly disproved every gun control narrative out there, that was completely cut out of the film. Why, you might ask? They honestly think, and they have to think because they clearly don't know anything, that his work has been refuted. Not only have his conclusions been replicated many times, in many journals, and by many researchers regardless of the methodologies or data sets used, he's gone on to debunk a great many of the big gun control studies published to-date. Guns are used far and away many, many times more often to thwart or deter violence than to commit crime of any kind, and there is zero evidence - empirical or otherwise - to the contrary. What's even worse is that Couric knows literally nothing about the Second Amendment or what it means to begin with. Neither does anyone who likes her work, either. None of the associated case law is cited correctly, if it all, and is even selectively edited down to make the decisions agree her factually incorrect assertions. Gun control, at its core, is only meant to disarm the poor and minorities. That is a widely-known, well-documented, and long-settled historical fact. Gun control advocates DON'T care about children, or enhancing safety in any way. They only care about how their baseless, fact-free virtue signaling makes them look to everyone else. They'll gladly crawl over the bodies of dead children to wave the bloody shirt and shield themselves from criticism with the crying parents and siblings they left behind. It's absolutely disgusting and wreaks of the desperation that everyone - even gun control advocates themselves - see in their movement as it implodes when states are rightly rolling back gun control laws across the country, and see crime rates continue to fall every bit as fast or faster than before as they have been for the last twenty-five years. There hasn't been any "increase" in mass shootings at all, either. Even CNN called them on their lies when it came to school shootings, and they're hardly a bastion of so-called "conservative" thought, either. As a matter of fact, Mother Jones, to their (minuscule) credit, pegged the number of mass shootings in 2015 at four. Yes, four. Four too many, true, and you'll never hear any argument from me on that. But, it's nowhere close to the shrill hysteria of "374" from admitted propaganda sites like The Shooting Tracker. Fun Fact: On no less than a dozen occasions, and likely many more, armed citizens have in fact stopped mass shootings. The politics of the obstructionist civilian disarmament industrial complex is spelled out clearly, here: they don't want you to own guns for any reason whatsoever, and they'll tell you any lie they can, in any way they can, and at every opportunity to convince you of it. There is no "compromise" or "middle ground" with these people, either. To compromise would mean that they would have to give up something in return, and they literally NEVER have. Nor will they. Ever. Their "middle ground" will be found when every single solitary gun is forcibly confiscated and melted down. They hate guns, and they hate you if they own one. Just like in this "movie" here, they'll demonize you at every opportunity if you so much as question their narrative. They'll block you on their social media sites. They'll talk down to you through the "news" media. They'll disassociate with and disown you socially. How can anybody possibly call THAT "balanced?"

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