Straw purchaser makes straw man argument
Steve Bailey, the reporter under investigation for allegedly using a straw purchase to attack the firearm industry is now trying to take apart the SAF.
Regular readers know I am being investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. This silly flap grows out of a column I wrote nearly two years ago about buying a handgun at a New Hampshire gun show. Gottlieb and like-minded gun fanatics went into spasms a few weeks ago after the column came up again on local radio. Gottlieb wrote my boss, Globe Editor Marty Baron, demanding I be fired, and asked the ATF to investigate his allegation that I was guilty of an illegal “straw” purchase of a handgun.
It is galling, to say the least, to be falsely accused of a felony by a convicted felon. But that is where we are.
There is no denial of the charge of course, just an attack against his accusers.
SayUncle Adds: Lots of info here. And other prior coverage of alleged journalist and alleged gun criminal Steve Bailey can be found here.
August 10th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Look on the bright side: if he says he has been falsely accused then it is an admission that he is a liar.
August 10th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
He needs to get the same judge who waved off the ATF and Feds lying to him. That’s a judge who won’t be impressed by a “silly flap”.
Best of luck to him. The Feds like to run up the numbers.
August 10th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
[…] guest blogging for Uncle, points out that Steve Bailey has written an a column attacking the SAF.  I’ll be honest, Bitter and I looked at SAF’s tax returns long before Steve Bailey […]
August 10th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
“Gottlieb wrote my boss, Globe Editor Marty Baron, demanding I be fired, and asked the ATF to investigate his allegation that I was guilty of an illegal “straw” purchase of a handgun.”
How can Bailey’s straw purchase be a “allegation”? He fessed up to it himself on radio and in print.
August 10th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
A confession doesn’t make you guilty… it just moves the spotlight your way?
August 10th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
So let me get this straight, a guy commits a crime to write how easy it is to commit the crime, but doesn’t think he should be prosecuted for the crime because a guy who thinks he should be investigated is an….activist, former felon, leader in the gun rights movement?
August 10th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
That EvilBob is a smart dude….
August 10th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
So Bailey arguably commits a crime and reports on it, someone calls for him to be prosecuted for committing that crime, and so Bailey uses the pages of The Boston Globe to run an expose on the guy. Classy.
August 10th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Funny this should all come out on Finneran’s show. I deleted WRKO from my presets when they hired Finneran. The guy was a career criminal (a career politician, but in the one-party Soviet system of Massachusetts, that’s the same thing) who finally went down gently on a single felony rap.
No wonder he and Bailey see eye-to-eye.
I stopped reading the globe so long again I never heard of Bailey before. The paper’s all-gay-all-the-time view of life just doesn’t have any traction with the rest of us. Good luck to the fewer and fewer chumps that advertise in there. Unless they’re selling jewelry or man-purses they probably aren’t reaching most of their would-be buyers.
But newspapers today are an interest community. The Globe will never again be a paper of record in New England, but it remains important to that small community. It will likely become increasingly insular, biased, and small as all those trends seem to be accelerating.
The real astonishing thing is that institutional shareholders still hold Times Co. stock, with no prospects of better management and no hope of control in the offing. At some point, even the Sulzbergers will order the Globe over the side into the shark-infested water, but they’ll probably shutter the Worcester Telegram & Gazette first.
And then, most of the globe columnists will be back in the public restrooms and highway rest areas where the editors found them.
August 10th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Evil Bob’s message needs to be enhanced and bolded at around 64 points.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
I hope Steve gets dragged backwards through the same knothole he’s trying to set up for us gun owners.