We’ve all been anxiously awaiting Part Two of Heidi Yewman’s one month of trying to carry a gun. Apparently because the staff at “Ms.” were overwhelmed with pro-gun commentary, and they are shocked (shocked!) to discover that some people on the Internet might be bozos. So they are shit-canning the rest of the story.
What was Kort’s solution to this dilemma? Incredibly, it was to kill the rest of Yewman’s series. “I don’t think I should post the next two installments of this—they’ll only fire up the troops again, and we’re just not equipped to handle this on our blog,†Kort wrote.
According to Ms. Kort, who is an Editor editor at “Ms.”, the rest of the series will appear on the Huffington Post. In my career of dealing with presenting and arguing controversial viewpoints on the Internet, I can say it sometimes will challenge your faith in humanity. I can hardly blame “Ms.” for censoring posts featuring the home address of the author, nor do I blame them for censoring truly nasty comments. But I can promise you those are a small minority of the comments that have been censored.
This is straight from the anti-gun playbook: censor dissenting viewpoints and shut down debate, then claim to be doing it because people who have a pro-Second Amendment viewpoint are nasty brutes who just want to bully and intimidate everyone. That has not been my, or anyone else’s experience anywhere else on the Internet where dialog is not moderated and people are relatively free to have open discussion. Yes, some people on the Internet are poster children for the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. This is not news to anyone, and while I support “Ms.” magazine’s editorial discretion, I think bowing out of this is cowardly, and shows they are not committed to having any kind of real discussion on a serious topic.
This is my shocked face. Since when do any of these anti-rights cultists ever truly want to have a genuine discussion?
I was half expecting the header of their article to be ‘Reasoned Discourse’.
Eh, I left a comment asking Japete to give a cite for her spurious claims and gave a car analogy as to the idiocy being performed by Miss Yewman. Except without any actual insults. Unsurprisingly, never got approved.
Seriously, how many subscribers does Ms. Magazine even have now?
Answer: A search on Google did not even give me a straightforward number. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19970923&slug=2561994
This article in the Seattle Times from 1997, which I linked above, puts the number of subscribers at the most in the range of 550,000. That number declined to 200,000 in the mid 1990’s after Ms. Magazine switched to a completely ad-free/reader-supported format.
Basically, Ms. Magazine by this time likely has less influence on public opinion than even National Public Radio.
never thought I would go on record saying Mother Jones was a well read publication . . .
I’m still unconvinced that the article was genuine. As has been pointed out by many gun bloggers and a few other journalists, there are many holes in her story — the fee seems wrong, the waiting time far to short, the lack of any training class, etc. — all of which may be explained as being details which were cut/glossed over for the story… or the whole thing is fiction.
She lives in WA so that sounds right. They tend to turn over the applications really quick and there are no training requirements. Also in the story she was open carrying, though she says she applied for her CPL WA is an open carry state and she would not have needed a CPL to open carry.
I dropped a couple of comments into yhe moderation black hole there myself. Neither was out of line in any way.
They are willing to lie about gun owners and statistics already, why would you think they wouldn’t lie about comments ?
So….MS Magazine is saying that getting MORE eyeballs on the story is bad for a blog/magazine.
Now we know why they are in decline.
I was pretty mean in my comments that never saw the light of day. However, the level of irresponsibility displayed by the author demanded a strong rebuke. I did not use any swear words, but the terms I used left no wiggle room (incompetence, irresponsible).
Still, as is noted above, since they regularly lie and distort, is it no surprise that they cannot have any real debate?
It boils down to the simple fact that they want to take away a God-given and innate right of self-defense by removing the best means of doing so and violating the Constitution to boot. I see no point in discussing this non-starter with these despots.
What is most telling about the anti-gun rights fanatics is Nocera’s statement that the pro-gun comments were “insults and vituperations”. I tried to post something about the actual probability of Yewman shooting someone with her gun in the next month. It didn’t get approved. Was it insulting? I didn’t think so. Vituperative? Certainly not. Reading various gun blogs, my experience was not unique. But the anti-gun people must control their echo chamber. Any pro-gun argument must be dismissed because pro-gun people are backward, uneducated, paranoid, who spew “insults and vituperations”. Make no mistake: it’s not guns these people don’t like, it’s us.
Ms. Kort and Ms. Yewman still have not answered my e-mails to them. I will keep sending e-mail and updating my post on this.
http://txfellowship.blogspot.com/2013/06/this-lady-is-idiot-updated-major-update.html
Sebastian or Bitter if posting the link is disallowed, please either edit or delete the comment.
Mark
Why keep sending them when they aren’t replying?
Because I want to see just how much they are hoping the situation blows over.
Plus it costs me nothing to send an e-mail.
Alleged hostile comments give Ms. Magazine politically correct cover for dumping Yewman’s series, but is there more to the decision?
Yewman’s lead-off to her series was a first person account of reckless behavior. Buying a gun she knew nothing about, approaching a police officer at traffic stop with a firearm… Just plain irrational and self-endangering behavior.
The editors at Ms Magazine were perhaps too firearms safety illiterate to understand the risk in her follies prior to publication. Maybe they’ve wised up a bit. Providing a platform to promote Yewman’s recklessness made about as much sense as promoting the deadly car surfing fad.
It’ll be interesting to see what form Yewman’s follow-up installments take over at HuffPo. If HuffPo gets around to publishing them, that is.