Gun control: Silly statements get past editors

Re: “Sin City left to ask which freedoms matter most,” (TNT other views, 10/6).

Sometimes I pick up a paper and wonder what’s happened to editorial skills. The TNT published this piece by a staff writer for the Las Vegas Weekly, written for the LA Times.

The author writes: “Right now, we are willing to give up everything in exchange for unlimited gun access.”

How does that get past the editors? One can quibble about the effectiveness of gun laws in America, but “unlimited gun access”? One might as well write that America has “unlimited heroin access.”

She also writes: “the good guys couldn’t take out the bad guy.” But wasn’t it the armed good guys who eventually did take out the bad guy?

She concludes with “God hasn’t seen fit to give us sensible gun regulations, but your representative can.” What “sensible” gun regulations can our representative give us that haven’t already been enacted? She is silent on that subject.

The mainstream media is accused of publishing “fake news.” I have doubts about that.

But it does seem true that all kinds of outlandish information gets published, and mostly it seems to result from editors failing to reject silly and inaccurate information.

This story was originally published October 13, 2017 at 5:42 PM with the headline "Gun control: Silly statements get past editors."