After decades of onerous background checks for gun buyers, oftentimes without plainly established criteria and without an appeals process, the mainstream media has begun howling at the Secret Service applying similar standards upon media members seeking credentials to report from the Republican and Democrat national conventions.

Boo hoo hoo.  Let me get you a tissue.

How does it fee to undergo the same sort of scrutiny tens of millions of gun owners have undergone for a generation or more?

The mainstream media has had very little problem with those extensive background checks on us.  In fact, the mainstream media has generally promoted and supported these so-called “background checks” every time.

Especially the left-leaning Daily Beast where this story comes from:

How The Secret Service Is Trying To Handcuff The Press

(Daily Beast) – The media fightback has begun after the Secret Service was given the power to run background checks on thousands of journalists who want to attend this summer’s Republican and Democratic Party nominating conventions.

The United States Secret Service—the agency that protects the president, foreign dignitaries, and various government officials, among other critical duties—has assumed an expanded new power that has Washington journalists up in arms.

The law enforcement agency—whose once-pristine reputation has been tarnished in recent years by scandal, congressional investigations and, more to the point, aggressive investigative reporting—is for the first time ever running background checks on thousands of journalists who want to attend this summer’s Republican and Democratic Party nominating conventions.

So you bash them, reminding your readers of some of the issues and challenges the Secret Service has overcome during Obama’s tenure.  That’ll make them like you even more.

Is it any wonder only 6% of Americans trust the mainstream media.  Of course, 6.5% of Americans are seriously mentally ill, so that explains a lot.

Journalists who don’t pass muster—in what several complain is an inscrutable security screening process for which there are no plainly established criteria, and from which there is no appeal—will be denied credentials to cover the GOP’s July 18-21 conclave in Cleveland, at which reality show billionaire Donald Trump is expected to be nominated, and the Democrats’ July 25-28 meeting in Philadelphia, at which former New York senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton will likely be named the standard-bearer.

And the amount of ink shed by these same journalists over would-be gun owners improperly denied their Second Amendment rights thanks to false positives in background checks?

Not a drop.

“I personally think it’s the government deciding who can and can’t be a journalist, and I don’t think the First Amendment allows that,” said Newark Star-Ledger Washington correspondent Jonathan D. Salant, a member and former chairman of the Standing Committee of Correspondents, the organization which represents the interests of the four media galleries on Capitol Hill (daily press, periodical press, photographers and broadcasters) and has run the credentialing process for political conventions—without Secret Service interference—since 1912.

Let’s redo that run-on sentence:  “I personally think it’s the government deciding who can and can’t be a gun owner, and I don’t think the Second Amendment allows that,” said Newark Star-Ledger Washington correspondent Jonathan D. Salant, a member and former chairman of the Standing Committee of Correspondents, the organization which represents the interests of the four media galleries on Capitol Hill…”

I think we would all agree with that.

But it gets better:

In a widely distributed “Dear Colleagues” letter, John Stanton, Washington bureau chief of BuzzFeed, wrote that the Secret Service’s new “process raises some troubling questions. What would disqualify a reporter from covering a convention? The lack of transparency leaves open the possibility of abuse.

Yeah, we gun owners have been crying foul over similar concerns about people getting denied on purchases and concealed carry licenses.

Again, how much work and effort has Mr. Stanton and his fellow journos put into protecting and defending gun rights?  But now that the shoe is on their foot, they don’t like how it’s pinching their toes.

He continues:

Over the last two years, for instance, several of our colleagues have been arrested while covering protests—would those arrests disqualify them? Could something like political activity in college disqualify a reporter? Without explanation or recourse, how would a reporter or an outlet even know what had prevented their credentialing?”

You mean sort of like arrests without convictions might disqualify someone from getting a concealed carry license or be able to buy a gun?

Oh, their whining is just priceless.