Medium is the brainchild of Twitter founder and billionaire-to-be Evan Williams. I think it’s supposed to be a blend of Twitter, Reddit and a blog. Or maybe Pinterest, Digg and Tumblr. It’s impossible to say right now. At the moment, only a small group of invitees can create content. “What we’re doing is ordering things by our best guess of the relative quality/interestingness of the different items,” Ev avers, “according to the people who have seen them.” Medium contains a section called Gun Rights & Wrongs, Debating Guns in America. It’s edited by Kate Lee, Medium’s Director of Content and self-proclaimed Newspaper Nazi. Checking the page, there’s not much doubt about which side of the “debate” Ms. Lee prefers . . .
The home page for GR&W has four “recommended” articles.
Barrel of a Gun was written by a Medium staff member Jason Stirman. His tale of being a brandishee contributes precisely nothing to the “gun debate,” save the assertion that being on the wrong end of a gun is some majorly scary sh*t.
Of “Monsters’ and Brothers makes a lot of excellent points about mental health care in these here United States. Too bad author Chantel Garrett can’t resist a cheap shot at, and mischaracterization of, the NRA’s position.
Before I do this, it’s necessary to first point out that the NRA’s call for a database of ‘monsters,’ among other hideous suggestions that assume that events like Newton can be prevented by merely keeping guns away from people with mental disorders, is both unrealistic and unhelpful to finding real solutions.
Dr. Dustin W Ballard’s The Bullet as Pathogen attempts to propagate the “gun violence as a public health crisis” meme, which argues for gun control laws and lots of ’em.
And consider the booming and mostly unregulated gun show industry, which makes it remarkably easy to purchase firearms, including excessively deadly ones (like the TAC-50 sniper rifle – which has a kill range of nearly two miles). Gun shows thrive despite evidence that regulating them (as California has done) decreases illegal sales and despite the knowledge that Mexican drug cartels are buying thousands of powerful weapons at U.S. gun shows.
Richard Abate’s Losing My Brother is as ancient (in internet terms) as it is predictable in its pro-gun control perspective.
Think of my brother tomorrow if you were his friend or part of his family, or if you are just reading this because you know me through a Facebook connection. Think of everything about him that is not what I described above, because he deserves our purist memory of his life. But on May 26, honor him by writing your senator and/or congressman and put background checks back on the table.
So Ms. Lee has front-and-centered two pro-civilian disarmament articles, one slanted in that direction and one that offers some excellent bullet points [sic] on mental health treatment.
There are four more “latest” articles beneath these on the Gun Rights & Wrongs home page. The first tells us “why Jerry Brown should sign the LIFE Act” (he didn’t). My Very Innocent Guns uses that headline sarcastically. Dear America wants to know why The Land of the Free is pro-gun—although the author’s not really interested. Why I Need My Gun at Starbucks is satire.
Total tally: seven out of eight articles are anti-gun. Not much of a debate is it? Oh and Medium doesn’t provide a comments section. The website might recover from this inauspicious start as it “allows” the general public to chime in with articles and elevate the ones they, the readers, consider worthwhile. Given Ms. Lee’s overall control of the content, at the moment, I’m rooting against it.