[There was a video here]

Used to be when a bunch of people got murdered with a gun, it was called a "murder." But now it's a "shooting," because the leftist media lies, except it's not a lie, but whatever. The point, according to this awesome he-hulk in an NRA propaganda video is: Don't watch the news!

"Now they race to label anything with a gun as a 'shooting,'" complains former Navy Seal and NRA Good Guy With Two Big Guns© Dom Rasso in the new video. "Because they know how much more attention they're gonna get with that word."

It's not immediately clear that 'murder' has left the American news parlance. But, you know, a "shooting" is a more precise description than a "murder." And some shootings don't even result in murders! Also, if all murders were shootings, there'd be no need to call them shootings. But since some do involve knives and bolos and frying pans, it's nice to distinguish murders by tools that did the murdering. Which probably explains why the NRA uses "shooting" to describe shootings all the time in their Twitter feed!

But let's not get too granular just yet. Back up a minute—back up to the beginning of this glorious video, with its generic hard-rock guitar-riff intro, its "PROPAGANDA" graphic emblazoned over a statue of Lenin, and Dom's opening words, superimposed on the screen as he reads them, you know, for maximum inculcating effect and minimum irony:

PROPAGANDA: Ideas or or statements that are often false or exaggerated and that are spread in order to help a cause, a political leader, or a government.

That sounds a lot like what I see every single day when I actually waste my time to keep up with what the news media is saying.

Don't waste your time with that media propaganda, Dom! Spend more of your time making paid videos for one of the nation's most powerful industry-funded political lobby groups. Videos that encourage viewers to discount and ignore information that doesn't account with what you teach in said videos. What I'm saying is, score one for the anti-propagandists here, who have no power whatsoever, except for the slick videos and the political scorecards, oh and also all the guns.

If you or someone you know wasn't actually on the "X," then you're getting third-party information. And we all know what happens when "he said, she said."

"He said" usually wins? Right?

Dom goes on to complain about the media's obvious propaganda aims by attacking early reports (he never calls out any specific ones) on the Navy Yard shooting that identified the killer's weapon as an AR-15 assault weapon, when it was in fact a shotgun.

Weirdly, while pressing for accuracy in reporting, Dom never points out that the shotgun in question was a Remington 870—which, like the AR, is popular with military and law enforcement units, and which the Navy Yard killer illegally sawed off into a more concealable weapon for, you know, assaulting people.

But let's don't stop to discuss facts, Dom is on an anti-propaganda roll:

Is there an emotional attachment to the word "AR," or assault rifle, or weapon of war? Of course there is! And that emotional connection is 100 percent created by the media.

Except the part that's partly created by the makers and sellers of said weapons, to sell lots of those weapons:

Seriously, though, Dom makes some excellent points:

Think of the media for what they are: an entertainment business. What sounds better for them: Two random, tragic acts of violence a few months apart, or connecting those isolated events by hyper focusing on the scary looking gun used in both?

There is an entertainment aspect to a lot of media. And there is a yearning for coherent narratives. And you know, it's a pretty coherent narrative to consider that more than half of American mass killers in the past three decades have used assault weapons, hi-capacity magazines, or both in their killings. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

Thank God that, unlike us crass propagandists, the NRA and its supporters don't try to oversimplify the facts with overblown connections.

Fuck it, let's forget all this and go to the range.