The May 17 editorial decrying the recent upswing in gun sales after the Rodney King verdict exhibits much of the sensationalism to be expected of an anti-gun publication. Long on hysteric generalizations, it was lamentably short on facts.
”Nowadays . . . for the vast majority of people, the security (a gun)
provides is imaginary,” claims the Tribune. The editorial goes on to talk about how many deaths guns cause.
What is not mentioned are the numbers involved. Gary Kleck, a noted criminologist and professor at Florida State University, has researched an independent study that found that annually, more than 1 million legally owned guns are used by law-abiding citizens in acts of private self-defense. Nearly 645,000 of those incidents involve handguns.
And yet the media, championing the anti-gun cause, never seem to report those stories. Only the sensational stories that play on emotion are printed. And in the end, that`s what the anti-gun cause boils down to: a sensational propaganda trick, full of showiness and devoid of any basis in fact.
