Today Tony Messenger published a hateful and baseless editorial directed at those raising alarm over at the much-maligned daily in St. Louis. He attacks State Rep. Tim Jones and Senator Kurt Schaefer for leading the investigation into a story I first told you about weeks ago:

Jones and Schaefer have held a series of fire-and-brimstone news conferences, calling Gov. Jay Nixon and state and federal law enforcement officials liars and cheats. Mostly, they’ve pandered to the fears of gun-toting Republicans in Missouri who are afraid that President Barack Obama is coming for their guns. They’ve stoked those fears, suggesting wrongly that the Missouri Highway Patrol has broken the law by sharing their names with the federal government. One problem: It’s all a lie. […] And yes, the state patrol shared the CCW list with the feds. But guess what? The law actually requires it. It matters little that the Legislature made Missouri one of the states to close its conceal-carry records. By making the conceal-carry endorsement part of the driver’s license records, lawmakers made it subject to the state and federal Driver’s Privacy Protection Acts, which plainly require law enforcement to have access to the records.

Messenger contradicts himself twice in in a few graphs. That’s a new record. First he claims that “it’s all a lie” that information was shared with the federal government, then says as much a graph later. Messenger conveniently omits how documents specifically mentioned that the ATF asked for Missouri’s CCW list. Completely unrelated to licenses. I’ve pasted below since Messenger has an inability to read beyond what the Nixon administration sends him. That last line:

This will be a joint venture with the Social Security and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (ATF).

The full document:

ATF, SSA, Missouri CCW Scandal Docs

Does Messenger still want to push the “it’s all a lie” deflection? Messenger also excludes the fact that Nixon signed the Real ID ban into power here in Missouri. The ATF asked for the CCW list; the mention of licenses is just an attempt at conflation. If they already had these records via the DMV they wouldn’t need to repeatedly ask. Does he still want to insult the majority of Missourians as “the Don’t Tread On Me fringe” considering we overwhelmingly vote and support the very measures being represented in the state legislature? No wonder the Post’s circulation has flatlined.

*UPDATE: Sen. Kurt Schaefer responds to the DLRS:

“After weeks of leading this investigation, I am no longer surprised by the ever changing stories told by unelected bureaucrats.”