Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Covering Guns And Educating Journalists

     He's aiming to be a resource: Covering Guns is an attempt (and a pretty good one) to provide journalists a non-partisan source for firearms info.  If they never manage more than to keep the ".9mm/45 gauge" type errors in check, they'll have done a great service -- but with actual safety-training-and-shooting classes for journalists in anti bastions like Chicago, Washington and Maryland, he's set his sights plenty higher:

     I have a simple goal for this website.  I want to help journalists cover the complex and politically tricky topic of guns and gun control. But this is NOT a pro or anti gun site. I strive to present as many sides of the story as I can. You will see links to the NRA and to anti gun sites.

     Gotta start somewhere.

5 comments:

OldTexan said...

I spent a little time on his site and it has a very strong anti-gun bias. I would imagine there are people in the gun community who know much more about this than I do.

Over 20 years ago I got a book written for writers that did a good job of presenting factual iformation about firearms. I don't remember the name of either the author or the book but it was apolitical.

In the last chapter the book was summed up by saying that some people really do know a lot about guns and they are very annoyed by mistakes in descriptions and use of weapons in stories.

jefferson101 said...

Maybe it's my pro-gun bias coming out, but I've got to agree with OldTexan in his preceding remarks.

I spent about an half hour there today,(Slow day at work. What can I say?)and I was a bit underwhelmed. Most of his links are to MSM articles, which are about as balanced as the top BB in a stack of 10, which I piled up myself. And no superglue was involved in the stack, either.

Maybe I looked in the wrong places, but when teaching your children to shoot is balanced by "My Son was Killed by an EVIL GUN!" in the article, it's not much of a balance.

YMMV, but if they'd juxtapose "My Son was Killed....." with "My serial Rapist stalker died because I shot him."????

That's more of a balance, the way I see it. Apples, Oranges, and suchlike, don't you know?

Roberta X said...

Given that the usual media bias is so horribly anti, simply sponsoring some go-shooty classes for journalists and having links to NRA articles is some progress.

Ain't no "wave a magic wand" and un-anti-ing the media. One step at a time.

Anonymous said...

Due to my OCD with such things, I find it interesting that 45 gauge would be .47 caliber. Not huge but bigger'n a .410.

I suddenly have an overwhelming urge to create a wildcat 46.5 gauge / .465 caliber pistol / rifle / shotgun combination monstrosity and start 3-gunning.

Roberta X said...

Happy to've...helped? ;)