The New York Times gave one of its coveted op-ed page columns over to reactionary blogger Glenn Reynolds today, while the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation(RTNDF) is about to bestow its First Amendment Leadership Award upon Fox News chief Roger Ailes.
Reynolds’ Times column, which may well have been ghostwritten by his long-time companion, Mary Rosh, advances the unoriginal idea that mandatory gun ownership laws may lead to a decrease in crime. In support of the concept he cites two towns with such laws: Greenleaf, Idaho, where there apparently is no crime, and Kennesaw, Georgia, a town of 25,000-plus which has had a pretty low crime rate since 1982 when the law was passed. Kennesaw is the anti-gun control poster town; Shererville, Indiana, a similarly-sized town without a mandatory ownership law, isn’t. Whatever. The point is that the Times gave a valuable piece of editorial real estate to someone with no actual qualifications to write about the subject and who then proceeded to, in essence, not write about it. Seems like a crime, but then New York has strict gun control laws, so maybe Reynolds is right.
The Roger Ailes story comes via Scoobie Davis, who comes via tipster Cell Whitman. According to the RTNDF press release, Ailes earned his award by making Fox News the cable news ratings leader, which is enough to vault him into the company of people such as Woodstein publisher Katherine Graham, First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, and cable news pioneer Ted Turner. Maybe it’s warranted: Ailes has certainly done his bit to ensure that anyone can say anything and get well paid for it. But a network which became the cable news leader on the strength of its demagoguery and a commentator who spends much of his time telling people to shut up seems like an odd vehicle to carry someone into the rarefied territory occupied by defenders and promoters of the journalistic faith.
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If I recall correctly, the crime rate in Kennesaw, GA. actually (publicized data) fell by 40%. This reduction in crime occured almost instantly after they publically accounced their intentions to arm every citizen. You’ll have to Google back in time to find the data.
Greenleaf is in Idaho. Idaho is NOT in the midwest.
Idaho it is. I was up too late.
Carl, it fell pretty dramatically. I did look it up; there seemed to be some disparity in the percentage but everyone agreed it was a lot. My objection was that two examples, one of which involved a town with no crime to speak of, don’t make a powerful argument especially coming from someone with no expertise in the area, and who is friends with a widely discredited theorist in it.
[...] As seen on BTCNews, you can compare different municipalities for things like crime rates/types. In response to a column in the NYTimes by tenured bloviator Glenn Reynolds on the benefits of mandatory gun ownership, we learn — to our great surprise — that Reynolds trotted out a widely-held but bogus ‘truth’ and found a way to sell it. The Houston Chronicle has more. [...]