Lazy reporting by the Burlington Free Press today on the issue of guns.
Front page, above the fold:
Gun, ammo sales soar
Vermont follows national trend; buyers fear stricter laws
What follows is almost five hundred words, plus pictures and graphics, on the apparent boom in sales of guns and ammunition, all starting “Soon after President Barack Obama was sworn into office”, and supported by interviews of gun selers and buyers, statistics, and this juicy quote:
“Basically, they’re afraid of the Obama Administration coming up with stricter laws,” Jim Datillio, owner of Dattilio’s Discount Guns in South Burlington, said of his customers.
What's missing? How about any discussion of what Obama has said, either during his campaign or since he took office, about what he proposes to do about guns?
How about any discussion of how the NRA and other right-wing organizations have been pounding the “Obama's gonna take your guns” drum ever since he started running, and have never stopped?
I guess analysis and reality-based reporting would be too challenging for them. Maybe they figure it's “fair and balanced” to report on the myth that Obama is about to take people's guns away, but it would be biased to correct the myth.
I've subscribed to a daily newspaper my entire adult life, but the Free Press doesn't make it easy.
UPDATED: Vermont Newsguy also covers this here.
It’s a bonanza for the industry. Olin Corp., makers of Winchester ammunition, reported sales up 30% over 2007. That’s in a recession, folks.
The NRA morphed into a corporate mouthpiece decades ago. The scare tactics are simply effective industry-wide marketing, tiding them over (and then some) when they should be seeing sales decline.
The other effect is the “bare shelves” cycle. The most paranoid got out there months ago and stripped the ammunition shelves in their local Wal-Marts and gun shops. The slightly less paranoid came in afterward, saw the shelves bare, and panicked. Wal-Mart managers are reporting people calling in to ask when the next shipment of ammo is coming in and then the whole lot selling out by 10 AM. Classic hoarding scenario. Prediction: A couple of years from now, when 1) we finally pull the majority of our forces out of Iraq, 2) Obama hasn’t proposed any new gun control legislation, and 3) the economy goes further down the tubes, there will be a glut of surplus ammunition.
Same issues for any firearm more suitable for shooting humans than deer.
I shoot targets with an old style flintlock muzzle-loader, but most of the guys I see at competitions overlap with the modern firearm group. The rhetoric is breathtaking. You’d think (what passes for) Western Civilization was about to collapse into some dystopic combo of Hobbsian chaos and Orwellian/Soviet repression. I have a couple of politically progressive friends I shoot flintlocks with, and we all have to bite our tongues and do the micro-eyebrow-arch to each other at these events. One of my friends summed it up thusly: “A piece of black “librul” fell on my head so the world is coming to an end.” Don’t bother trying to tell the NRA guys anything different.