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Blame the cowards, not just the NRA; Kirstin Kennedy – BCT editorial board; Beaver County Times; April 19, 2013. This editorial appeared only in the print edition of the BCT. I apologize for any transcription errors.
Like Messrs. Patrick O’Shea and J.D. Prose, Miss Kennedy is a part-time BCT reporter in addition to being a pundit. Previous Kennedy-written editorials I critiqued were “Scouts should stop playing straight” and “Death to Prince Charming.”
Below is a detailed critique of portions of this column.
You can find critiques of other BCT gun-control rants here, here, here, here, here, and here.
When a professional pundit leads off with name-calling and continues the sandbox behavior throughout a piece, it’s a clear sign she knows she’s on shaky ground. Before she calls anyone a “coward,” perhaps Miss Kennedy should think about who hid behind the victims of the Newtown shooting to further her/his agenda. Heck, President Obama flew “Eleven family members of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting … from Connecticut to Washington … aboard Air Force One” so they could lobby for tougher gun control laws. If that wasn’t bad enough, Mr. Obama even used the mother of a six-year-old victim to deliver his weekly address. In fairness, Mr. Obama uses the “human prop/shield” tactic as SOP when trying to sell one of his schemes. Getting back to the topic of cowards, wouldn’t it be cowardice to vote for something you didn’t believe in just because polls said you should?
The centerpiece of the editorial was “the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.” Yet, if you punish yourself and read the complete editorial, you’ll find at no point does the author tell readers which provisions of the bill would have prevented the Newtown murders. That’s because Miss Kennedy knew no provision of the Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act (S.AMDT.715) addressed anything relevant to the Newtown shootings. That is, even if the bill had been implemented long ago, the Newtown victims would still be dead, injured, or grieving for their lost family members and friends.
Miss Kennedy wrote, “When 90% of the American people are in support of an issue, there is no way that the Senate should be split, especially over a very simple safety measure, as this legislation is.” There’s a reason we have a representative republic (constrained by a constitution) instead of a “democracy” as Miss Kennedy wrote. The Founding Fathers/Mothers knew a democracy would be little more than mob rule. For example, in Federalist 10, James Madison (a Founding Father and fourth President) wrote, “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” One of the reasons we have a representative republic instead of a democracy is to avoid enacting emotion-guided laws in the heat of the moment.
If the subject amendment is “a very simple safety measure,” why is it about 20 pages long? As for polls, I tend to avoid giving them a lot of meaning because their outcome can be determined by who is surveyed and how questions are set up and asked. Polls can be concocted to refute/support just about any position on any issue.
What about Miss Kennedy’s selective fondness for poll results? Despite polls showing the majority of “the American people” opposed Obamacare (which included nationalizing the student loan business), I don’t recall Miss Kennedy complaining when Mr. Obama and the Democrat-majority Congress rammed it down our throats without a single Republican vote. As for “bipartisan support,” you’ll likely find this is an issue for Miss Kennedy only when she needs to write something like “but Republicans also voted for ___________ (fill in the blank)” when yet another leftist policy/program inevitably turns into a mess.
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