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2018年2月28日 星期三

Zorn: The best tweets and the most scathing commentary on the NRA

The week's best columns, reports, tips, referrals and tirades from columnist Eric Zorn.

Chicago Tribune

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February 28, 2018

chicagotribune.com

Eric Zorn's Change of Subject


A dozen finalists in the Tweet of the Week poll again this week. 

Because my sense of humor is so dark, my favorite is the one about blood donation.

Last week's winner was "Yeah, the Founding Fathers wanted people to be allowed to own guns. But they also wanted people to be allowed to own people, so maybe all their ideas weren't perfect" by @rmayemsinger, which does not express an original thought, obviously, but certainly felt right for the moment.

One of my regular conservative readers refused to vote in the poll because he just knew the anti-gun tweet would win. Woe.


Speaking of anti-gun, I rather went off on the National Rifle Association in two of my columns from the past week. The excerpts will explain.

Wednesday - The NRA boycotts are already working, and here's why


I'm not reflexively hostile to private gun ownership by responsible adults, honest. But I'm irate about the NRA's radical obstruction of proposals that would limit access to instruments of mass slaughter and its vicious hostility to mainstream liberals….I don't want to support such paranoid crazy talk, even indirectly, so I'm siding with the boisterous and evidently growing movement calling for a boycott of FedEx until it rescinds its implicit endorsement of the NRA.

 


And Friday - It's not NRA money that's the problem, it's NRA voters 

My heart is with the other newly activated students and their supporters who are furious about the NRA's outsized influence on American politics. It's a radical, paranoid organization that leads the charge against virtually any measure to limit access to firearms or to limit the damage that individual weapons can do. The NRA fights efforts to trace guns and to study the efficacy of various gun-violence reduction methods.

Both columns take something of a turn, though, and Friday's column drew a suprising number of thoughtful letters from NRA-adjacent conservatives who are also uneasy with the frothing nuttiness of the NRA.

Here's the thing. I've long been what many of my fellow liberals consider an apostate on gun control. I'm skeptical of many of the proposals and generally supportive, as noted, of the idea that law abiding adults ought to have the right to own guns for self-protection, target shooting and hunting (though my view of this "sport" is very dim, as you'll see in Do only sadists kill for fun? A debate about the ethics and aesthetics of hunting). For a non-gun-owning urban liberal, I'm pretty open-minded about firearms. But the NRA infuriates me because I really believe they care more about having unfettered access to all the guns they can afford than they do about the appalling loss of life occasioned by this nation's romance with guns. Our gun-homicide rate per capita is 10 times or more higher than in Canada, Italy, Belgium, Finland, India, The Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, Spain, New Zealand, Norway, Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Iceland, Japan, China and other modern first-world countries you could name.

I challenged a gun-rights advocate to explain this fact in an email: "It's in our national DNA," he wrote.

So… just give up?


In my non-gun column this past week, Shameful decision by a Downstate TV station allows Pritzker to cancel a debate, I wagged my index finger sharply at a downstate TV station that cancelled a Democratic gubernatorial debate because the front-running candidate declined to participate.

By effectively allowing J.B. Pritzker to cancel the TV debate, WCIA denied his opponents an opportunity to reach a statewide audience, and thereby assisted in advancing his campaign strategy.
Once the stations had decided that devoting an hour to educating the voters about the candidates and issues in the Democratic gubernatorial primary was a worthy use of their airtime, no candidate, not even the front-runner, should have had unilateral veto power over that decision. Put an empty chair on the stage! Let his absence speak for itself! The issues in this race are extremely important, and shutting down a forum on them because one of the candidates says he has something better to do that night isn't just wrong, it's also an irresponsible use of your broadcast license.

 


In that same column I also took a swipe at one of Pritzker's foes, Daniel Biss, for holding a news conference outside of Pritzker's house:

Unless it's the White House, politicians' homes should be off-limits for stunts and demonstrations. Family members and neighbors ought not be dragged into the drama.

Notice: Subscriptions to the Mincing Rascals podcast are now free on iTunes! WGN-AM's John Williams anchors a news-review chat show that usually includes me and some combination of Steve Bertrand, Scott Stantis, Kristen McQueary and Patti Vasquez. Now, admittedly, yes, like most podcasts, this show has always been free. But it remains a great value!

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