NPR does an interview on the Glock, which is very fair to the issue. The interview is with Paul Barrett, author of Glock, the Rise of America’s Gun. They get into how anti-gun groups maligned the Glock by essentially misleading the public about its characteristics. So have the anti-gun groups lost NPR? It’s hard for me to understand why these folks haven’t found more productive careers in other issues.
10 thoughts on “Have They Lost NPR?”
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I need to listen to the NPR story (tonight after work) before answering that question in any sort of definitive way but I have spent many hours talking and corresponding with Barrett. He doesn’t view himself as anti-gun but being an advocate for bans on 10+ round magazines, licensing, and registration certainly keeps him out of the pro-gun camp.
Perhaps NPR can relate to the irony of the advocating a ban of the gun being responsible for its success as a lesson in how not to accomplish your goals.
I thought it was a very fair report.
Wow. Coming from NPR, this is incredibly fair and balanced. I’m impressed.
Because what they’re finding is that only the furthest left support gun control. The center left is full of active sportsmen and shooters.
For the times, they are a changin’. For NPR it was a surprisingly fair and balanced report. At this point in the decades long debate, more and more people are becoming sophisticated enough and fluent enough to know BS from reality. Going forward,I would expect that NPR and other left of center media outlets will present the debate in a much less polarized and much more critical and rational manner. We are winning. We can’t relent but the truth is on our side and our rationality and data will ultimately carry the day.
One BIG caveat about this story: Paul Barret holds up New York City as a “model” for the nation in how we can combat crime will still respecting the 2nd Amendment.
Think about what this means. NYC-style licensing is held up as the model for which we should strive. NYC gun laws are NOT what we are willing to accept, and should themselves be challenged as unconstitutional infringements when the time is right.
That’s not how I heard it: He mentions NYC not as a model in terms of licensing, or even in terms of gun control, but as a model for *CRIME* control. He points out that crime has dropped there radically over the past couple of decades, while their gun control laws were essentially unchanged, and he points to better policing, not stricter gun control, as the cause.
He also makes the point that reasonable controls that don’t seriously infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of the individual are fine, and he points out that we already have them but they aren’t necessarily enforced on a consistent basis, which I think is a fair assessment.
Another thing he points out is that there is a large culture of people who like shooting a lot, whether it’s because they were raised hunting, or were in the military, or law enforcement, or even because “they like action movies”, and that if you want to make progress towards reducing gun violence, you have to take our feelings into account. It’s sort of a veiled and politic way to say “Hey, stop calling these guys mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging idiot rednecks, because they are actually more right about the subject than you”.
All in all, it’s a balanced and fair treatment. I’ll take it, especially coming from NPR. Remember, this isn’t a case of preaching to the choir, this is evangelizing in pagan territory, which makes it all the more remarkable.
FWIW – I downloaded the mp3 (Haven’t listened yet). iTunes put it in the “Blues” category!
It is a fair article. However, I’ve heard a few other articles in the last month or so that were full of “assault weapons”, “high capacity clips” and other gun-grabber memes.
Given the generally liberal (little ‘l’ on purpose) agenda of NPR, there’s no way that the gun-grabbers can be too pleased when there is an even vaguely gun friendly story on NPR.
That was a pretty good and balanced interview. In fact, I’d say it comes off better for our side than the other. The reference to NYC was about controlling crime, not controlling guns. I especially enjoyed his comments about denying reality. Boy does that describe gun grabbers!