By now everyone has seen this propaganda piece put out by the NRA claiming that the Obama girls have armed guards at their school. There's only one problem: That claim isn't true. Shame, shame, NRA, for living in such a deep silo you actually
January 19, 2013


[h/t Scarce]

By now everyone has seen this propaganda piece put out by the NRA claiming that the Obama girls have armed guards at their school. There's only one problem: That claim isn't true. Shame, shame, NRA, for living in such a deep silo you actually relied on a Breitbart.com report without any fact checking.

Buzzfeed:

"[The] school Obama's daughters attend has 11 armed guards," the longer ad's narrator says, citing an article from Breitbart.com.

But a fact-check by the Washington Post found that not to be the case. The Postcalled the school, Sidwell Friends, where Obama's daughters attend and asked if the school had armed guards. The school responded that none of their 11 security members carry any firearms.

But where did the myth of armed guards at Obama's school come from?

A quick search found that the first post about it came from the Weekly Standard's blog. A post by Daniel Halper said that the school — attended by both Obama's and David Gregory's children — had 11 armed guards on staff, citing the 11 members of the security team. The error by the site presuming the security at the Quaker school was armed led to the NRA's two incorrect ads.

Well, yes, it led to them. But the NRA cited an article at Breitbart.com in their longer propaganda piece. Here's the screenshot:

nra-screenshot.jpg

J.K. Trotter at The Atlantic picked this up late Friday:

You can see what's going on here. An erroneous report on Breitbart.com, the conservative activist news website, led NRA officials to believe that Sidwell Friends employs armed guards. (Breitbartseems to have misread a job posting for a security officer.) The NRA even appropriated Breitbart's argument: that the existence of such guards at an elite private school reveals Obama as an out-of-touch elitist, unaware of his own hypocrisy. From Breitbart reporter A.W.R. Hawkins:

Shame on President Obama for seeking more gun control and for trying to prevent the parents of other school children from doing what he has clearly done for his own. His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.

Hawkins adds:

If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards — they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point [...] that this is standard operating procedure for [Sidwell Friends], period.

It's worth noting here that Breitbart is not an underground website, and the report the NRA ads refer to is not obscure: it currently boasts over a thousand comments, and was shared on Facebook or Twitter by over 143,000 people.

Color me shocked -- SHOCKED -- that Breitbart News advanced a false story in order to feed the NRA's paranoia. Why, I'm sure they've never done anything like that before, have they?

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