Guns and gays
Zendo Deb looks at an unflattering press piece about the Pink Pistols, complete with lame references to shooting straight.
7 Responses to “Guns and gays”
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April 12th, 2006 at 10:18 am
I’m a member of the range they mention in the article, and shoot there regularly. I see PP folks there sometimes, and a few people in the pictures even look familiar. A few years ago my friend jumped through all the NFA hoops to get a submachine gun, which tends to attract attention when shooting it at the range. A couple of guys came over to ask about it after we were done shooting, and after talking about the NFA process a bit, they said they were from the Pink Pistols and invited us to some event they were having, which we politely declined. Once we got out to the car I turned to him and said, “You don’t think they thought we were a gay couple do you?”. I have no idea why I found that amusing, other than the fact that a gun range would be the last place I would have thought I’d be worried I set off someone’s gaydar, but I figure it was more likely they were just being friendly.
I’m not at all surprised by the local press’ treatment of the PPs. The Philadelphia press is rabidly anti-gun, especially with their corrupt and useless mayor running around blaming all the violence on guns rather than his own incompetence at dealing with it. What is a bit surprising is they are even insulting to gays in parts:
That’s pretty un-PC if you ask me, but I guess it’s okay because they are evil gun owners.
I think sometimes that activists for marginalized groups actually thrive on the groups victimhood status, and the reason the PPs get so much flak from the gay community is because they’ve decided to stop being victims. A gay guy in a hospital after a gay bashing makes for better press and PR material than a gay guy in custody because he shot his attackers. I really like the fact that these guys drive the left into hysterics. The Pink Pistols should be a welcome addition to the pro-gun community.
April 12th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
What’s so unflattering about it? It’s a pretty typical PW piece on guns, in that I could swear that they’re almost deliberately trying not to convey their personal opinion on the matter. Both sides were presented in a neutral manner.
Yes, PP’s do come off as a bit kooky in this article, but no more than bloggers posting photos of their 10 year old kid posing with gigantic AR15’s, or a bunch of overweight people holding guns with smiles across their face like they’re about to get laid. Does the article appear to make them seem like dangerous maniacs with no regard for human life? Yes, but consider this – if you see one guy telling another one he’d have no qualms about shooting a kid who’d break into his house, your initial reaction of him would probably be different depending on whether you saw them in a gun range, or in a local supermarket. Pro-gun group appearing in a fashionable urban rag printed in the city notorious for its anti-gun policies is “obviously” being misrepresented by a biased cocksucker of a reporter, right?
And just what the definition of ‘rabidly anti-gun’ is? Hell, NBC10’s “Murder in Philadelphia” special even confronted (!!!) the police chief with several emails to the station from the residents asking that dick why in the world would the cops be afraid of law-abiding carry permit holders with ridiculously low crime rate. The police is getting barraged with accusations of killing several people who opened fire on plain-clothes officers believing they were gangsters or robbers, and no one that I know of is suggesting that banning guns is the answer. I’m sorry guys, but the media up here is for the most part sticking to the facts, and if some of the things they talk about are the unavoidable consequences of guns being freely available to people with clean criminal records, well that’s not the reason to get blue in the face and start throwing accusations of ‘bias’.
Seriously, if you base your opinions of people, things, and places you know nothing about on colorful anekdotes, why would I take seriously anything else you believe to be true?
April 12th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
rpm, i think the reference to ‘can’t shoot straight’ and some others are unflattering. COuld be wrong though.
April 13th, 2006 at 12:41 am
rpm:
I will admit that this article’s treatment of the PPs is conflicted rather than being outright anti. I wouldn’t call it objective and unbiased because of how it was presented. What I mean by ‘rabidly anti-gun’ is that the press in this area is all too quick, and perhaps eagar to give a voice to city politicians that guns are the major issue in the city’s gun violence, and the city would be a peaceful “City of Brotherly Love” if only those evil Republicans in Harrisburg would give the city the authority it needs to stop issueing and recognizing permits duly issued under the laws of this Commonwealth, and proscribing anyone from having an assault weapon within city limits. You’ll never hear, at least I’ve never heard, anyone in the press mention the Pennsylvania’s constitution:
The right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned
And then try to get a Philadelphia city politicians to explain how that means:
The right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned except by the City of Philadelphia
Bias isn’t always outright. Sometimes it’s subtle. And not making corrupt city politicians face what our state consitution clearly says is giving them a free pass on the issue. Thus, for our media, it would seem that everything would be fine if they could just take away my guns.
April 13th, 2006 at 2:54 am
If by guns you mean “street guns”, then hell yes the local media is biased. If anything, there is a definite support for “taking guns off the streets” (as in, the relative ease with which a person with an urge to buy a gun can circumvent the legal roadblocks such as the PICS system), and that too many otherwise law-abiding people are too eager to reach for their guns at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. Are these assumptions true? I don’t know. Philadelphia is a big city, and these problems don’t exist in the area where I live, so I’m not qualified to answer. Is this even important to the question of whether the local media has anti-gun bias, or just anti-guncrime bias? Not really.
I’ll be as short and clear as I can. The reason you don’t see pro-gun bias in the local media four months after 2005 was declared as “murder-a-day” is the same one you don’t go to a Republican rally and proclaim that United States foreign policies are directly responsible for putting WTC in the crosshairs of radical Islamic extremists. You WILL be misunderstood, there WILL be death threats, and there WILL be picket rallies first thing next morning. No one wants that, the media business especially. This is my theory, and I’ll leave it at that. If the media turns out to be unworthy of my defense, well, that’s not the first time I was wrong. When I was told about the stories of pointless and gratuitous prisoner abuse by the military couple of weeks before Gitmo story blew wide open, I called bullshit. Now I’m supposed to feel morally superior because even though we torture suspects, we’re better than Saddam cause, see, our prisoner mortality rates are way lower.
April 13th, 2006 at 9:01 am
I thought that was pretty good, especially if it’s for a paper with a normally anti-gun slant. I would have expected a lot more space devoted to quotes from the group’s detractors (up to half or more of the article), a couple anti-gun faux-facts from Kellerman/Brady to be reported as unquestionable fact, and giving an anti-gun voice the summing-up paragraph. But the majority of it is matter-of-fact reporting on the PP group itself. In that context, the title is just silly. If you’d told me this appeared in the local gay weekly instead of a general-audience paper, I wouldn’t have suspected otherwise.
April 14th, 2006 at 7:43 pm
Ok so I live in Cincy yea the city with the fast rising death murder kill toll…. Anyways I tried a while back to chat with some local gay friends about becommin ccw, their seems to be a vast majority of scared of guns, or some sort of attitude in the gay community, I was shocked, for a gruop that has more at risk for being victims why they wouldn’t want to defend themselves better… I have met a few women couples though who are damn good shooters… So not that there arent some armed Gay folks, but more so seems to me like they are afriad of it then not. FWIW my 2 cents…