Baltimore Sun Tricia Bishop: I'm More Afraid of Legal Gun Owners Than I Am of Criminals with Guns...

says the dumbest person to ever hold a job as a "journalist."

When I started this post there were about 398 comments (all negative) on her op-ed. The number is down to about 321 now.  The Baltimore Sun has deleted all comments that referenced  Ms Bishop's arrest for DUI back in 2004.


 Do you know the gun owners in your circle?
We need a searchable database of gun owners online that we can consult before arranging play dates.

Tricia and her husband

Here's a few tidbits from her op-ed: emphasis mine

It's inevitable when my husband and I visit family these days that the subject of violence in Baltimore comes up. Often, I'm the one who raises it. But when it came up last week on a trip to see my parents in Georgia, I got my back up. I thought of the 11-hour drive south and the billboards we passed along I-81 boasting guns for sale ("A Glock for Christmas"!), and of the story my brother-in-law, who lives in Florida, told of a neighbor stopping by to shoot the breeze in his suburban driveway, a handgun holstered at the man's waist as their kids played nearby.

Yep, nothing more dangerous than a holstered gun when kids are nearby. Never know when it will jump out of that holster and start mowing down innocent children. 

   I'm less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore, I declared as we discussed the issue, than I am by those permitted gun owners. I know how to stay out of the line of Baltimore's illegal gunfire; I have the luxury of being white and middle class in a largely segregated city that reserves most of its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods overtaken by "the game."

You just don't get more racist than that, now do you?  Baltimore reserves most if its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods?  Does that mean that legal gun owners are swooping into the poor black neighborhoods and gunning down innocent black people?  Guess what, Tricia, you don't have to engage your white privilege by living in a safe yuppie neighborhood with your pansy-assed whiter than white husband, Scott Calvert, who writes for the Wall Street Journal.  If you feel that strongly, how about you move to one of those poor black neighborhoods to show your solidarity with those poor people who have been taken over by "the game."  What the hell does "the game" even mean?  

And so, as President Barack Obama announced plans this week to tighten background checks for gun buyers and increase gun tracking and research, I thought, that's all well and good, but how about adding something immediately useful: a gun owner registry available to the public online — something like those for sex offenders. I'm not equating gun owners with predatory perverts, but the model is helpful here; I want a searchable database I can consult to find out whether my kid can have a play date at your house.

Are you going to check if they have a pool, some knives in the kitchen, a hammer, or if their electric outlets are child proofed?   How about you just ask them instead of requiring everyone's personal data to be spewed all over the internet?  You won't ask because you know that would mean everyone would know what a clueless fool you are.  And whoever coined the term "play date" should be banned from ever having kids.  

[...]Before the 33 percent of U.S. households containing a gun (half of which don't secure them) gets too worked up, they should know that it would likely include many of my relatives and their friends. My parents grew up in small town Minnesota, and hunting was a regular part of their lives before they left for other states, and it still is for many they know. My folks were taught how to handle guns and use them safely. But that doesn't do much to allay my fears; it's the simple presence of the weapon in the home and the possibilities it presents that terrify me. read the rest

While reading the over 300 comments (100% negative), I learned a new word - hoplophobia, a political neologism coined by retired American military officer Jeff Cooper as a pejorative to describe an "irrational aversion to weapons." It is also used to describe the "fear of firearms" or the "fear of armed citizens."

I also learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect which is  a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.  I would say that covers just about every libtard I've ever met, and certainly fits Ms Bishop.

Ms Bishop should offer thanks to her higher power that the poor blacks in Baltimore are, for the most part, functionally illiterate and can't read her op-ed.  She has placed herself on the top of the list for places that are safe to rob. 

Tricia Bishop is The Sun's deputy editorial page editor. Her column runs every other Friday. Her email is tricia.bishop@baltsun.com; Twitter: @triciabishop.