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"A Safer Society -- WIth Guns"
It's staggering that the Boston Globe ran this article.
· media
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...The New York Times owns the Boston Globe, since 1993.
Hell has not frozen over but it is sure getting cold.
I'm shivering!
You can take your parkas off. Jeff Jacoby is the Globe's token sane editorial writer. They publish something of his every now and then to amuse their readers and convince themselves of their fairness and tolerance.
I read these comments before going to the article and now knowing it was written by Jeff Jacoby I don't need to read it or wonder about it; as Ken M says, he's sane, notoriously so in my mind for being on the Globe staff.
This is part of a much wider trend of "positive" articles about firearms ownership.
I know that some folks might think my tinfoil hat is too tight, but here goes.
The media is running "pro-gun" stuff to alleviate fears that it is "in the tank" for Obama--i.e., that it is committed to supporting him with the same biased coverage that got him elected (think of "reporter" Chris Matthews describing the "thrill" that ran up his leg at some Obama gathering).
This might not sound far-fetched if you recall the inklings by even pro-Obama folks that was expressed at the end of the campaign: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR2008110702895.html
Deborah Howell argued in the Washington Post: "The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts."
So we might be seeing pro-gun articles planted here and there in the months leading up to November so that the "gun lobby," by which I mean "grass roots Second Amendment supporters," will drop their guard and vote for Obama in November.
That's my take on all this.
It is hard to imagine any "grass roots Second Amendment supporters" letting their guard down under these circumstances. The President was previously a member of the Joyce Foundation Board of Directors back when two major Second Amendment grants were funded by the organization. Both were aimed at rewriting American Second Amendment history in the image of gun control advocate views. In the first, a number of professional historians, including Jack Rakove of Standford and Michael Bellesiles of Emory, were recruited and well reimbursed for presenting their opinions on Second Amendment development and intent in the Chicago/Kent Law Review Symposium. IIRC, David Hardy wrote about the unheard of largesse of the stipends provided to the participants in the Symposium, none of whom supported an individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.
For the second related grant back when the President was on the Joyce board, the Foundation provided nearly $400,000 to fund establishment and operation of a Second Amendment Research Center under historian Saul Cornell at Ohio State University. This was another grant intended to historically support the gun control advocate interpretation of the Second Amendment and provide it with historical creds.
Later, at the time of the Heller case, Prof. Rakove, of the Chi/Kent Symposium team, was the primary author of the professional historians' brief supporting Washington DC in the Heller case, and Prof. Cornell, of Ohio State's Second Amendment Center, also took credit in authorship. Thirteen other historians joined in denying the Second Amendment's individual rights protecting nature. That brief, in addition to presenting numerous errors of fact to the Supreme Court Justices also conflated the history of the Second Amendments with that of an entirely unrelated militia powers amendment.
For anyone who would like to examine how these professional historians, recruited into the Second Amendment legal battle with a little help from our President, twisted American history around to make the Second Amendment into the exact opposite of what it was intended to be, a look at my fisking of the historians' claims would be beneficial.
My History News Network article (op-ed) criticizing the historians' Heller brief can be found here: http://hnn.us/articles/47238.html
[For a look at some "how dare a peon question academics' pronouncements" comments on the article, click on the 0 Comments indicator for what is actually a rather extensive commentary list]
For a detailed and documented examination of the historians' erroneous claims in their Heller brief, the first of twenty-four parts of my series Root Causes of Never-Ending Second Amendment Dispute can be found here at my blog, On Second Opinion: http://onsecondopinion.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2008-12-31T21:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2009-01-28T22:24:00-05:00&max-results=40&start=39&by-date=false
The historians Heller brief itself can be found at Alan Gura's website: http://www.gurapossessky.com/news/parker/documents/07-290tsajackn.rakove.pdf
First the LA Times, and now the Boston Globe. Will the NY Times be next?!