By: Kayleigh Hamilton
An anti-gun reporter saw the light and had a stunning conversion.
He realized how guns can be used for good when they are in the hands of good people.
And now his career could be in jeopardy after he changed his mind on guns.
Scott Pelley is a reporter for CBS News who is perhaps best known as a correspondent for “60 Minutes.” Like most mainstream journalists, he is known for skewing his reporting to the left.
As of 2022, only 3.4% of journalists were Republicans, and there is a strong anti-gun bias that comes along with media giants being located in cosmopolitan areas.
However, on a trip to Ukraine, Pelley saw another side of guns that shocked him, and he realized that guns can actually be useful.
After all, Ukrainian civilians, who are not part of the military or the government, have taken up arms to defend their country against Putin’s Russian invaders.
And in doing so, they have protected a tremendous number of their countrymen, including women and children.
Scott Pelley was not expecting to find this, and it may have changed his outlook on guns.
According to Bearing Arms, “Defensive gun uses happen every day across the United States, but they rarely are covered by the national news media. Occasionally armed citizens will act to defend themselves or others in a spectacular fashion or on camera, which may result in a brief report on the nightly news, but for the most part DGUs are ignored by major press outlets.
“On Sunday evening, however, the CBS News program 60 Minutes devoted an entire segment to armed citizens fighting back; not here in the United States, but in Ukraine, where civilian resistance fighters took on elements of the Russian army in the province of Kherson. Reporter Scott Pelley interviewed several of those armed civilians, some of whom had never held a gun before they took up arms in defense of their community. Others didn’t use firearms as their primary weapon of choice; instead making Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons to engage in small-scale attacks on the occupying military force.”
This must have come as a huge shock to Pelley, who almost certainly thought before this trip that the only reason anyone would ever own a gun is because they want to commit a mass shooting.
The article continues, “I’m not knocking CBS News for covering these resistance fighters, though tying their story to continued US funding for Ukraine’s defense was a little heavy-handed, at least in my opinion. Still, 60 Minutes has always engaged in more explicit advocacy than programs like the CBS Evening News, and at least Pelley and his editors are editorializing in support of the right of self-defense.”
Perhaps the people who watched this segment on “60 Minutes” will rethink their views on guns after seeing them used for noble purposes in real life.
And maybe CBS will be a little more friendly to gun owners in the United States – not just Ukraine – going forward.