This one caught my attention because of the title: Bus ride with ex-inmates triggers thoughts on guns. This instantly caused me to ask myself "are ex-con labeled when riding the bus or do they have an innate ability to make guns pop into the minds of those who enter there general area?" The author of this letter, apparently has a sixth sense about where people come from (or only ex-cons ride the bus from Danville to Bloomington).
My real interest in this letter is not the conceal and carry message that the author is trying to get across. I really have no interest in deconstructing THAT debate, but rather the rhetorical strategy used to support concealed firearms. The letter starts:
Ironic, Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig disease. What are the odds?Let's ponder this for a minute. Lou Gehrig was not a criminal and he actually died of ALS, a degenerative disease that affects the nerve cells of the brain and spinal cord.
Why then would someone use this analogy? Does Denny intend to imply that Lou Gehrig caused his own death, like he assumes "innocent" people in Illinois are doing because they have failed to "demand" a concealed weapons law? If so, that's offensive. Maybe he's trying to use the analogy to say that criminals will "cripple" society and thinks that Lou Gehrig somehow makes sense in this analogy. Maybe I am too sensitive to people using metaphors of illness to talk about other people's choices. I'm pretty sure ALS wasn't even called Lou Gehrig's disease when Lou Gehrig died from it.
The wierdest part of this letter...the comment section is full of things like "great letter." Did I miss the point or the logic here, and if so would someone please explain it to me.
1 comment:
Our local paper publishes letters (and comments on the letters) of that nature, too. I've come to believe that the newspaper editors are fully aware of how idiotic the letter writers sound, but publish the letters anyway because they'll create a reaction.
IMHO many newspapers (certainly Springfield's) fail utterly to reinvent themselves for the changing world of information. They're losing subscribers by the thousands, even hundreds of thousands, and they're desperate to get attention, to get subscribers, to have a hook.
None of us can look at brutal, naked stupidity without feeling something, whether for or against. I believe the newspaper editors are fully aware that they're giving the village idiots a soap box every week, and that they consciously do so in order to stir up feelings, to get attention, to hook subscribers from all sides of an issue by starting an argument.
While I tend to reject assertions that the world is, on the whole, a worse place than it was a generation or two ago, I make a very large exception for mainstream journalism.
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