In The Country Of The Hearing-Impaired, The Tone-Deaf Man Is...?

     I don't know.  He's certainly not king.  He's not the court jester, either, though you've got to read carefully to find out:

     Indiana Representative Jim Lucas figures if you're okay with licensing the public practice of one Constitutionally-protected right, you can't really argue against doing the same for the rest of them.  Irresponsible journalism can cause great harm, he points out, so why not start there?

     It's heavy-handed satire.  Rep. Lucas has long been a proponent of bringing "Vermont carry" to Indiana, but the hit dog yelps, especially in a news cycle dominated by President Trump's ill-informed* Twitter-fight with network news.  So of course, the Press bit.  And of course, the Press missed the point.

     Rep Lucas, never one to mind wrestling a pig, seems to have tried to use even more satire to clear things up.  It is working about as well as you might expect.

     Meanwhile, I'm sitting over here remembering that Mussolini was a journalist long before he became a fascist dictator, and that Mein Kampf and Das Kapital have, between them, prompted the murder of tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Guns are indeed dangerous -- but so are ideas and the ready promulgation of them.

     And so, too, is dangling temptation before the foolish and short-sighted.  Today, it's satire.  Who will the laugh be on tomorrow?  Personally, I support the unlicensed carry of journalists; they're only as dangerous as the person wielding them.
________________________________
* Networks don't have licenses; individual stations do.  Only a tiny fraction of U.S. TV stations are actually owned by the network they carry.  Most people don't know that and assume that the station they watch ABNBCBS on must, in fact, be that network.  So when a President Tweets, "Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to public!" he is channeling H. L. Mencken's Everyman, and threatening his waiter for the misdeeds of the cook.