Former NPR CEO and now former leftist, Ken Stern, is now one of the many Americans who stepped outside of the thick bubble of American leftism and discovered a whole new world existed beyond. The experience apparently changed his mind about a lot, including gun control.

Stern released a book about his experience of exploring conservative America titled Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. To promote it, he wrote on learning the truth about Conservative people in the New York Post.

Stern began his article by admitting how easy it is for a reporter to fall into the groupthink that encircles the leftist media.

Most reporters and editors are liberal — a now-dated Pew Research Center poll found that liberals outnumber conservatives in the media by some 5 to 1, and that comports with my own anecdotal experience at National Public Radio. When you are liberal, and everyone else around you is as well, it is easy to fall into groupthink on what stories are important, what sources are legitimate and what the narrative of the day will be.

Stern went on to say that for a year he experienced a conservative America that he and his fellow leftists believed were represented by “Jerry Falwell and the movie “Footloose.””

He also said he experienced what it’s like to carry and use a gun during a hog hunt. The experience, he wrote, changed his mind about his previous positions in favor of gun control.

Over the course of this past year, I have tried to consume media as they do and understand it as a partisan player. It is not so hard to do. Take guns. Gun control and gun rights is one of our most divisive issues, and there are legitimate points on both sides. But media is obsessed with the gun-control side and gives only scant, mostly negative, recognition to the gun-rights sides.

Take, for instance, the issue of legitimate defensive gun use (DGU), which is often dismissed by the media as myth. But DGUs happen all the time — 200 times a day, according to the Department of Justice, or 5,000 times a day, according to an overly exuberant Florida State University study. But whichever study you choose to believe, DGUs happen frequently and give credence to my hunting friends who see their guns as the last line of defense for themselves and their families.

Stern recently appeared on Morning Joe where he was drilled about his discoveries and reaffirmed to co-host Willie Geist that guns are not the problem in America.

“The most extraordinary trend in modern American criminal history,” Stern said. “At the same time, the number of guns have gone up. Those two things aren’t correlated, but it’s clear we know how to drive down gun murders without gun control, and the question is why are we talking about gun control when there’s other things that we’ve been doing for 25 years that actually have reduced murders in this country by an extraordinary amount.”

Stern is a perfect example of what happens when you go into strange territory with a truly open mind. Discovering the truth may cost you your beliefs, but it’s far better than living in an ideological bubble. Especially one that slowly destroys you like the leftist bubble does.

(h/t: Free Beacon)