If you needed evidence that biased misinformation is more harmful than no information, you needed to look no further than CNN on Wednesday morning.
Just a little while earlier, the news had emerged that a shooter had opened fire on Catholic students in Mass at a school in Minneapolis. School had just started on Monday, and the Wednesday morning service had been meant to mark the beginning of the school year.
At 11 a.m. ET, it was known that the shooter was dead, and it was known that many were injured, although the exact number or if any were dead had been unreported. What wasn’t known was that the shooter was an anti-God, anti-Jewish, anti-Trump transgender former student with serious mental health issues who left a number of messages to that effect on the guns he used. This would become an optics problem for the liberal media as the day unfolded.
But the fact that a shooter had targeted a Christian institution was already problematic for the narrative-weavers — so, naturally, as the transcript shows, CNN was focused on the guns. A neighbor close to the Annunciation Catholic School said that he heard “maybe 30 to 50” shots being fired and said that it went on for “several minutes, I mean, three minutes or four, I mean, which is a long time for live gunfire.” A reporter with the CBS affiliate said, there were “people with looks of just shock and horror on their face witnessing this unfold in real time” outside the school.
Then, about nine minutes from the top of the hour, Evan Perez — identified as CNN’s “senior justice correspondent” in the transcript and put in quotation marks for reasons that will soon become apparent — was brought in to discuss the case.
The discussion was boilerplate stuff: how these shootings are commonplace, how the FBI has “studied the source of psychology and just the phenomenon that we have live through uniquely in this country really compared to other countries like this” and how “what they find repeatedly is that you have these shooters who take advantage of the fact that there’s nobody there to challenge them and the fact that they can shoot for however long they can, sometimes until they run out of bullets.”
“This would have been obviously one of the happiest times of the school year. Everybody’s back. Everybody’s talking about their summer. And then this happens. We don’t know whether this person is associated with the school, but obviously this is — this would have been well- known in that community that there’s an all-school mass,” he said.
This all isn’t very bad, as senior justice correspondence goes, until anchor Pamela Brown said, the neighbor told reporters “it sounded like the gun was reloaded several times. It seemed like a rifle, he said, a semi-automatic rifle, and it went on for several minutes.”
Do you think Perez was intentionally lying or woefully ignorant?
It is here, rather conveniently and with seeming deliberation, that Mr. Perez decided to start poisoning the waters.
“Right. And, look, that’s not uncommon, as well,” Perez said.
“These things can shoot dozens of bullets in just one trigger pull, right? And so what happens in this case is sometimes they have enough time to reload,” he said. “It’s one of the most horrific things for students to be sitting there.”
“Oh, awful,” Brown responded.
And wholly untrue:
WATCH: CNN’s Evan Perez LIES about how semi-automatic rifles work.
Perez says that a semi-automatic rifle can “shoot dozens of bullets in just one trigger pull.”
That is factually inaccurate. A semi-automatic rifle fires one bullet per pull of the trigger.
False anti-gun fear… pic.twitter.com/W6VWnOEhoh
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 27, 2025
The first thing that a “senior justice correspondent” should know about, I would think, is the nature of what constitutes a “semi-automatic” weapon.
It is a weapon where, each time the trigger is pulled, one round is fired and another round is automatically chambered from the magazine, setting it up to shoot. You still have to pull the trigger again, obviously.
What Perez is talking about are fully automatic weapons — i.e., so-called “machine guns” — which have been illegal to manufacture in the United States for almost 40 years now. Transferring old automatic guns is almost impossible or illegal without an extensive and stringent background check, and their rarity at this point makes them prohibitively expensive.
Whatever the case, these weapons are rarely if ever used in mass shootings, and there was no evidence, when he was speaking, that the shooter used such a gun. In fact, Brown specifically said the neighbor — who apparently knows more about these weapons than CNN’s “senior justice correspondent” — had said the firearms used by the shooter sounded like “a semi-automatic rifle.”
These do not, obviously, “shoot dozens of bullets in one trigger pull.” We’ve never even heard this feint before, which is somewhat shocking when you think of the amount of gun-related disinformation out there during mass shootings.
Anyone who says this in the course of their professional duties should be immediately corrected by somebody who knows better or be relieved of their job. Neither of these things happened, and both the anchor and Perez went on talking about how this went on for minutes and minutes, which — again, given the number of bullets the neighbor estimated were fired — meant that, in Perez’s mind, this could have been accomplished in somewhere between one to two trigger pulls.
In the whole scheme of things, perhaps it seems to some to be cold and pedantic to focus upon a blunder by an expert CNN dragged in to fill airtime. However, it comes as liberal and progressive politicians attempt to posture after shocking events such as this to tighten laws on guns while deliberately misinforming people which firearms are affected. The former administration, it’s worth pointing out, mounted the same campaign of trying to ban semi-automatic weapons while being deliberately evasive about what those really were.
In that case, of course, we had a president who was senile and had an excuse for getting things mixed up. A “senior justice correspondent” at one of the most prominent cable news networks has no such justification for misinforming the populace.
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