The Southern Illinoisan, a small-town newspaper out of Carbondale, Illinois (home of Southern Illinois University – Go Salukis!), doesn’t seem satisfied by its sagging circulation numbers.
So, in an effort to push them (further?) into irrelevancy, they publish an inflammatory editorial to share with they surely assume are the unwashed masses that are their subscribers.
“…The U.S. has a gun problem and a certain segment is stockpiling arms. Just 34 percent of American households own firearms, the Pew Research Center reported last year. But gun sales are at historic highs. Meanwhile, any proposed regulation on firearms — highly efficient tools specifically designed to kill — is met with squeals from the right-wing ideologues and gun industry’s lap dog, the National Rifle Association. The gun cult is, one-by-one, tearing down state-level restrictions, such as concealment permits. It’s an assault on reason and the rule of law. Enough is enough.
Firearms have a place in American culture. Yet they’re so widespread, so easily accessed, the U.S. is one of the most violent countries in the developed world. [Scumbag’s name redacted]’s father gave him a .45-caliber pistol for his 21st birthday, Reuters reported.
“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” President Barack Obama said Thursday.
It’s time for real gun control — universal background checks, ownership transfer limits and mandatory cooling-off periods. The insane have run the asylum for too long….”
So, we gun owners are insane cultists?
If I were a subscriber to The Southern Illinoisan, I’d be calling to cancel my subscription and ask for a refund.
Here’s my quick reply to their pathetic piece.
Congratulations, The Southern, on falling for the hoax that was the NY Times’ opinion piece “The Growing Right-Wing Terror Threat”.
Do you take the time to fact check?
You cite some stat provided by “Police Executive Research Form”.
You *can’t* even get the name of the mysterious group right. It’s the “Police Executive Research Forum” and it’s funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
What is the MacArthur Foundation? Since you didn’t research it, here’s what Capital Research found:
…”the MacArthur Foundation showers money on arms controllers, including in the 2001-04 period the Arms Control Association ($650,000), the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation ($575,000), the Center for Defense Information ($650,000), the Federation of American Scientists ($2.5 million), the Pugwash Conferences ($350,000), U.S. Pugwash ($150,000), and the Union of Concerned Scientists ($1.4 million).”
But it’s not just gun control advocates it supports. There’s more: “A subsection of MacArthur’s funding of research on “pursuit of security here and abroad” is labeled “protecting fundamental values.” Here all of the grants go to left-wing groups including the American Civil Liberties Union ($1.25 million), the Center for Democracy and Technology ($250,000), the Center for Investigative Reporting ($250,000 “for support of a documentary film entitled No Place to Hide: Stories from a Surveillance Society”), the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law ($65,000 “for work designed to reduce the evidence of hate crime and likely landlord and employer discrimination toward persons of Middle Eastern ancestry”), the League of Women Voters Education Fund ($225,000 “for support of the project called Local Voices Citizen Conversations on Civil Liberties and Secure Communities”), and Physicians for Human Rights ($200,000 “to send three two-person teams to the Afghanistan region to monitor and document the human rights situation there”).”
Let’s call this tragedy what it is: An insecure, unstable, drug-abusing social misfit who has nothing to live for decides the only way he’s ever going to get the world to sit up and take notice of his pathetic existence is to commit an atrocity.
He does the unthinkable, and suddenly the mainstream media makes him famous, telling Mr. and Mrs. America every detail of his pathetic life.
Why is it America’s mainstream media and our society seem to glorify sociopaths while demonizing those who wish to be able to protect innocent life from social misfits and anti-social violent criminals?
Your editorial is making the rounds, make no mistake about it.
I love this paragraph: “The U.S. has a gun problem and a certain segment is stockpiling arms. Just 34 percent of American households own firearms, the Pew Research Center reported last year. But gun sales are at historic highs. Meanwhile, any proposed regulation on firearms — highly efficient tools specifically designed to kill — is met with squeals from the right-wing ideologues and gun industry’s lap dog, the National Rifle Association. The gun cult is, one-by-one, tearing down state-level restrictions, such as concealment permits. It’s an assault on reason and the rule of law. Enough is enough.”
I would expect this writing from Mother Jones. But I got it instead from a newspaper in Southern Illinois? What’s wrong, boys and girls? Are you not losing subscribers fast enough that you’re trying to alienate the vast majority of your remaining readers?
We can agree on keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and lunatics.
Did it occur to you that this young man was already a prohibited person, by law, when his father illegally gave him this gun for his 21st birthday? What’s more, his mom didn’t trust him with it (sanity prevails) and took it from him, only to have this monster misfit steal it from her to commit this atrocity.
The buck stops with this lunatic.
And for the record, unlike you, I won’t write or publish his name or likeness to give him one more iota of notoriety.
You would think a small-town paper in the middle of a very gun-friendly part of the state wouldn’t be alienating its target audience. Then again, perhaps your editorial board isn’t composed of homegrown locals, but instead big city bigots.
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