...and yes, I just said that.
As some of you may know, I'm in the habit of fact-checking articles that other people post to Facebook. Mostly Right-leaning articles, I'll grant, but that's just because most of the people I know hereabout are Conservatives and that's what Conservatives post.
So when a conservative friend of mine posted a link to a blog called Guns Save Lives, I was expecting more of the same. Which I got...and which I didn't get.
The article was titled Iowa Columnist Says NRA Should Be Labeled Terrorist Organization an Its Membership Killed; I just assumed that it was more Right-wing exaggeration and didn't take it seriously. But I looked into it.
The article was far better than most of its ilk, being well supported with full in-context quotes from the Liberal anti-gun piece in question, even if it started out a bit colorfully. (Well, it's a blog post after all; what else did I expect?) It also linked back to the original article in The Des Moines Register.
So I looked at the article in The Des Moines Register.
There I found a piece by Donald Kaul, a semi-retired former regular columnist at the Register. I read his piece carefully, and compared his piece to what had been written (uncredited - no author was given) at Guns Save Lives. I used Google to try to find other opinions, and while I got numerous other hits that merely repeated what Guns Save Lives had posted (usually verbatim) I also found an link to this story at MSN.
(I also read the original source on the Right, which was of course Fox News. While I found the Guns Save Lives blog post to be well supported and mostly free of inflammatory rhetoric, exaggerations and standard criticism of the "Liberal Left-wing media," I cannot say the same of the article from Fox. The blog post read more like a news story than the piece from Fox, supposedly a news agency, which read more like a typical Right-wing blog post. Fox: if you're going to expect to be taken seriously as a news source, we expect better of you.)
(That was the obligatory Fox-bashing that I am required to do as a Left-wing blogger.)
To be frank, I expected to find what I usually find when fact-checking articles from the far Right: crap. I expected to find that the Right-wing blog post was yet another example of the Right being long on rhetoric but short on facts, as most such far-Right blogs tend to be. What I found was unexpected: Donald Kaul really did say those absurd things, really did call for the NRA to be labeled a terrorist organization, really did call for the NRA to be outlawed, and as for calling for the killing of NRA members...well, I'm going to give Kaul the benefit of the doubt and assume that he didn't actually mean what he said, but that's what he said.
(Here's a choice cut or three from what Kaul actually wrote, quoted directly from The Des Moines Register: "...I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner...to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light....If people refused to give up their guns, that 'prying the guns from their cold dead hands' thing works for me....And if that didn't work, I'd adopt radical measures." I shudder to think what Kaul would call a "radical measure.")
Yes, there is a point that I'm trying to make here, and this is it: Extremists ultimately serve no one but themselves. Whatever your cause, it isn't helped by pandering to the extremists who happen to share your values. Calling for murder or mayhem isn't going to endear anyone to your cause. (No one you want to endear to your cause, anyway.) I'm talking about Liberal extremists, Conservative extremists, Muslim extremists, NRA extremists, and anti-Muslim or anti-Liberal or anti-Conservative or anti-NRA extremists. All extremists. But wait, there's a catch...
I could say that it's time to expunge the extremists from the national debate, but this is a free country and extreme opinions, like all opinions, are protected by our Constitution. And rightly so. Like it or not, even extremists have a voice in the national debate and I am not going to advocate taking it away from them. Our country prides itself on the fact that everyone has a voice; that's free speech. But calling for murder (if that's what Kaul was doing) isn't free speech, it's suborning murder. And no one has a Constitutional right to suborn murder.
Free speech is a tricky thing. On the one hand you can say anything you like, but on the other you can't use speech that is intended to cause deliberate harm. The rule-of-thumb is: You can't yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater, just to cause a disturbance.
And that's the problem: you could argue, to use the right-to-bear-arms issue as an example, that the violence in our society constitutes a "burning theater" and you have a right to shake people up by yelling "Fire!" But the law says otherwise: It's how a reasonable person would interpret your actions that determines whether you are within your rights to yell "Fire!" And I don't see a reasonable person saying that the theater is burning.
And I don't see a reasonable person saying that Kaul's remarks are themselves in any way reasonable.
Just to let you know where I'm coming from: I'm not anti-gun by any means. I come from a long line of hunters. I've owned rifles, shotguns, an automatic pistol, a black powder revolver, and even an assault weapon. (Depending on how you define "assault weapon;" it was a semi-automatic 5.56-caliber Valmet M56, built on the venerable AK-47 pattern and capable of taking 30-round magazines as well as a drum. I sold it to a postal worker.) I do support reasonable restrictions on the ownership of some weapons, including what are generally called "assault weapons." I don't consider such restrictions as the first step on the slippery slope that will have us all sliding inexorably toward banning all guns. If we are on that slope, the first step was when Og told Grunt that Grunt couldn't bring that club into Og's cave.
It's as a card-carrying Liberal that I write this: Donald Kaul is an extremist, and his extremist writings came awfully damn close to breaking that shouting-"Fire"-in-a-theater rule; the article in question was ill-considered, ill-worded and, frankly, made me ill.
In this case, a Right-wing blog was absolutely right.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.
Kaul's original article: Kaul: Nation needs a new agenda on guns (Des Moines Register)
The pro-gun blog post in question: Iowa Columnist Says NRA Should Be Labeled Terrorist Organization and its Members Killed (Guns Save Lives)
Their source article from Fox: Des Moines Register publishes gun-ban column advocating dewadly violence against NRA, GOP leaders (Fox News) (Well, be fair: they did.)
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