Liberal Hypocrisy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

6

Sigh… the hypocrisy of liberals. You can’t make this stuff up. From The Wall Street Journal.

The manager of a business in West Nyack, N.Y., Caryn McBride, was receiving vaguely menacing “negative correspondence” and phone calls. At least twice she made reports to police, in one case telling them “she was worried because an email writer wondered ‘what McBride would get in her mail now.’ ”

The cops told her there was nothing they could do, for the communications were not true threats and thus “did not constitute an offense.” That didn’t reassure McBride, who was understandably worried that the missives might have come from a dangerous criminal. So she decided to protect herself with guns.

As the Rockland County Times reports, McBride is the Rockland editor of the Gannett-owned Journal News, a rival newspaper based across the Hudson in White Plains. “Due to apparent safety concerns,” the Times reports, the Journal News “decided to hire RGA Investigations to provide armed personnel to man the location.” The Times “has not investigated” whether the paper’s headquarters is also protected by men with guns. (White Plains is in Westchester County, outside the Times’s circulation area.) Nor has the Journal News reported anything on its own hiring of armed guards.

Under normal circumstances, a company’s lawful security arrangements would hardly be newsworthy. But as we noted Monday, the Journal News provoked the bitter backlash that so frightened McBride by publishing a report in which it named residents of the two counties who have done exactly what the Journal News has now done: lawfully availed themselves of their rights under the Second Amendment.

The article, titled “The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood,” was accompanied online by a database listing the names and home addresses of all pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties. (The Times reports that officials in Putnam County, north of Westchester, “have since announced their intention to not comply with the Journal News’ request for the names and addresses of pistol permit holders”).

The story began with an alarming anecdote: An old man “approached a female neighbor on the street and shot her in the back of the head” last May. “What was equally shocking for some was the revelation that the mentally disturbed 77-year-old man had amassed a cache of weapons–including two unregistered handguns and a large amount of ammunition–without any neighbors knowing.”

What seems to have been unreported is the fact that gun used by the mentally disturbed man was an UN-registered handgun. The liberal Journal News went on a vendetta against the Second Amendment, of which it disapproves, and those who comply with the law, using as its justification the illegal actions of a deranged individual (where have we heard that story before?) And then, feeling intimidated, as do most of the very legal gun owners it “outed” resorts to armed guards… armed with GUNS… to protect itself from the perceived threat.

Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up.

The Journal News never got around to explaining how the commission of a violent crime with an unregistered gun could justify stigmatizing and invading the privacy of citizens–including many retired policemen, according to the report–who have complied with the law and obtained permits for their firearms. And if the public has a “right to know” when the fellow who lives next door has a gun permit, why doesn’t the same right apply to those who live and work near the Journal News’s offices?