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Sunday deadline looms for comments on Nickels gun ban; press laziness continues
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Seattle residents, and presumably anybody who visits the city and utilizes its public parks, the Seattle Center and other public venues, still have a couple of days to comment on lame duck Mayor Greg Nickels’ proposed ban on firearms on all properties administered by the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.
Comments may be submitted here. Deadline is Oct.4.
Under the latest incarnation of the Nickels ban, even legally-armed citizens would be prohibited from park areas where children might be present. This includes some 500 facilities around the city, such as pools, baseball fields and community centers. The mayor cleverly insists this isn’t really a gun ban (that’s against state statute and the state constitution) but it would be a trespass situation, where armed citizens would be asked to leave and if they do not, they could be cited or arrested for criminal trespass by Seattle police.
Residents can submit comments by Oct. 4, 2009, at www.seattle.gov/firearmsrule or send comments to: Seattle Parks and Recreation Department, 100 Dexter Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98103.
I’ve written in this space before about Greg Nickels and his gun ban, here and here, for example. Today he is hosting the leadership of the U.S. Conference of Mayors as the organization’s president, which must give him an odd feeling because he was ousted from office in the August primary and only has a couple of months remaining to serve in office.
Nickels seems determined to leave the city with a huge legal mess, because he is certain to be sued if he puts this plan in place. The Second Amendment Foundation and its sister organization, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, have vowed to pull Nickels and the city into court if he initiates the handgun ban. They will likely be joined by the National Rifle Association, putting Nickels in the insanely undesirable position of battling the three most legally successful gun rights organizations on the planet. (Has he ever heard of George Armstrong Custer?)
That should give Nickels pause because SAF’s lawsuit against the City of Chicago over its handgun ban was just accepted yesterday for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. Legal analysts are predicting that SAF will win that case, leading to incorporation of the Second Amendment to state and local governments as a limit on the types of gun laws they can adopt, including specifically a handgun ban.
Legal experts have said that gun rights advocates are likely to prevail in the Chicago case. - Los Angeles Times
SAF is joined in the Chicago case by the Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) and four Chicago residents, and is known as McDonald v. Chicago. They are represented by attorney Alan Gura, who won the Heller case before the high court last year, and Chicago attorney David Sigale.
This brings us around to a continuance of my criticism of the press over its lazy reporting. The other day, readers will recall that I took to task Puget Sound press agencies for incompletely reporting the story of the Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply LLC in Tacoma.
The press, including the Associated Press, reported that a federal judge had upheld the revocation of the Bull’s Eye federal firearms license, which was technically accurate, but hardly explained the story in its entirety. (After my column appeared and was circulated around other news agencies, the story started straightening out.)
This is the full story: Former Bull’s Eye owner Brian Borgelt lost his federal license. However, current (since July 2003) Bull’s Eye owner Kris Kindschuh has not lost his license, the store is still in business on Tacoma’s Puyallup Avenue, and Kindschuh’s federal firearms license was recently renewed for another three years.
Borgelt is considering an appeal. Kindschuh, whose employees have fielded hundreds of calls since the initial story circulated, is flustered. It could have all been avoided if only someone had picked up a telephone and called Kindschuh before rushing to be first in print.
But the press has outdone itself in reporting the Chicago gun case.
Back when I was in journalism school at the University of Washington, my professors – and mentors to some extent – kept hammering about “Details, Details, Details!”
The Illinois State Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation filed a lawsuit against the city of Chicago - World Net Daily
In all of the reporting about the Chicago case, it does not appear that anyone understands whose lawsuit was accepted by the high court. For months, the press concentrated solely on the NRA v. Chicago (and the Village of Oak Park) case, hardly surprising since the NRA is a pretty big target, and to reporters who privately disdain “gun nuts,” the NRA represents a gun lobby monolith.
This happens because the press has become accustomed to singling out the NRA for editorial abuse. So mentioning the NRA in relation to gun legislation, litigation or crime is something of a mindless reflex action. To do otherwise would require reporters to acknowledge that the firearms community has more than one national group, and is far more diverse than the press would like us to believe, sort of like calling every beer a “Bud.”
As a result, the SAF case, which names only the City of Chicago as defendant, was allowed to fly under the radar even though it was filed first, so when the high court accepted that case instead of the NRA’s (both cases have plenty of merit and at one point during the appeals process they were considered together, and both were listed together on a Supreme Court document), one can tell from the reportage that journalists were stymied. It is as though reporters at the Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, CNN, CBS affiliate WBBM, local Fox affiliate WPMT, Denver Post and a host of others froze at the keyboard, unable to type “SAF” when they probably expected to type "NRA," so most just referred to the plaintiffs in a generic sense. Stunning was the Wall Street Journal’s omission of this important detail, a fault for which the WSJ is not typically known. The WSJ and the Washington Post also got the two cases confused, reporting that attorney Alan Gura, who represents SAF and ISRA, had filed the lawsuit against Chicago and Oak Park, but that is the NRA's case. In a couple of instances, individual Chicago residents were identified as plaintiffs, which is proper. In another story, the Associated Press simply alluded to "the National Rifle Association and its allies," as if to say without admitting their ignorance that they had no clue who actually filed the lawsuit that the high court finally accepted.
Though faced with potential limits from the high court on their ability to enact laws and regulations in this area, 34 states weighed in on the gun-rights side before the justices agreed to take the case Wednesday, an indication of the enduring strength of the National Rifle Association and its allies. - Associated Press
Instead of identifying SAF and ISRA as plaintiffs specifically, both groups were almost uniformly ignored. The two exceptions I found were with World Net Daily, and a Los Angeles Times blogger named Kate Linthicum. They got it right.
And this from a news media that seemed to dwell on every facet of Sarah Palin’s life just one year ago, to the point of absurdity.
Over the years, gun owners have properly complained that the press lacks accuracy when it reports literally anything about firearms. From offenses that include improperly identifying gun types to discussing so-called “cop-killer” bullets, reporters have demonstrated a horrific inability to get their facts complete or straight.
That said, two things should not be surprising: press inability to accurately report all the details of the Chicago lawsuit that will be heard by the Supreme Court, and the continued visceral distrust of the press by gun owners.
For more info: National Rifle Association. Second Amendment Foundation. Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
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