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Gun rights community should not cheer so loud over demise of Seattle P-I
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The death of an American newspaper — any American newspaper — is a sad event, despite the often highly-justified criticism that their editorial pages are horribly tilted to the political and philosophical Left.
When it was announced earlier this year that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was on the block, far too many cheered its imminent demise as a voice in the Pacific Northwest. Not the least of criticism came from gun owners who have long felt that the P-I had, through editorials and editorial cartoons, been unfair, lopsided, occasionally vindictive and even vicious toward the Second Amendment.
Newspapers are in trouble, perhaps because their news coverage has been — in the minds of far too many potential and former readers — suspiciously favorable to Democrats and Liberals (not always the same creature). Look at the casualty list: the Rocky Mountain News closed down a few weeks ago, just shy of its 150th birthday. The New York Times is in serious financial straits. The Hearst Corporation, which owns the P-I, has also added the San Francisco Chronicle to the endangered newspaper list. Even the Seattle Times, which will be left as the only daily in that city if the P-I closes its doors, is not in the best shape, according to the Seattle Weekly.
It’s easy for the gun community to chortle at the P-I’s demise without thinking things through. Just because of the perception that the newspaper has used the First Amendment to savage the Second, that’s no reason for gun rights activists to use the Second Amendment as a club to beat up on the First.
True, newspaper editorial boards all-too-frequently sneer at gun owners and gun rights. But in Seattle, it has been more often the Times, rather than the P-I, that has been guilty. Recall that when the much hated Initiative 676, a Draconian gun control measure, was on the ballot in 1997, the Post-Intelligencer opposed it while the Times endorsed it.
Certainly, the P-I’s Joel Connelly and cartoonist David Horsey — with whom I went through the University of Washington’s School of Communications, and worked with on the UW Daily back in the early 1970s — have not been friendly to the Second Amendment. The late Emmett Watson, who worked for both Seattle dailies, held equal disdain for “gun nuts.”
"Our Second Amendment rights are being violated!" they scream, even though most of them wouldn't know the Second Amendment from the Second Coming.
Odd as it might seem to many on the Left who believe the caricature of a gun owner as an ignorant, beer-bellied redneck, one will find more solid, across-the-board support for all civil rights within the gun community than one finds among gun prohibitionists. All-too-often, not only do such folks favor stripping citizens of their gun rights, they’re uncomfortably favorable to denying gun owners their free speech rights. Wait until you see the comments in reaction to this column!
If, and more likely when, the P-I folds, its loss will be a loss to all of us, including gun owners. Perhaps the gun community didn’t get many breaks on the editorial page, but I’ve had good relationships with P-I reporters who often asked for clarification on technical gun questions, misunderstandings about gun law (I wrote a book on Washington firearms laws that many attorneys and cops use as a reference guide), and I also had a few of them to the range, teaching them to shoot and understand the difference between types of firearms. On the other hand, there were also times when it appeared to gun activists that a story tried to draw too many tears, and fire up too much emotion, over firearms. Like it or not, that is news.
The P-I has also allowed gun owners the opportunity to “shoot back” in its “Soundoff” sections, and you gunnies certainly have taken advantage of that! When the newspaper goes, that opportunity will also be lost.
Maybe, some suggest, if the newspaper had truly been more balanced in its approach to guns, if it had a better outdoors section that provided solid hunting coverage, if it had approached all conservative concerns with the same vigor it promoted liberal agenda items, perhaps it would not be looking at the graveyard as its next stop.
Odd, isn’t it, that many in the newspaper world have long considered the Second Amendment “outdated” when it now appears that newspapers on the printed page, smelling of ink and kerosene, and maybe nicotine and sweat, have also started outliving their usefulness. Where we “no longer need to have guns for protection,” as some editorialists have contended, it appears now, thanks to the Internet and an abundance of alternative news sources, we’re no longer in need of newspapers with their sensational headlines, gut-gripping 25-words-or-less lead paragraphs, and the ability to grab a reader’s interest and hold it.
The death of a newspaper is a sad day for the First Amendment, and a sad day for one civil right is a sad day for all of them.
Check what my colleagues are saying today:
Sue Frause, Seattle Travel Examiner
