“For political journalists, South Carolina was the center of the universe last week,” Callum Borchers [above] writes at washingtonpost.com. “The state hosted two presidential primary debates and trotted its governor into the national spotlight for a televised response to the president’s State of the Union address. But a Republican lawmaker there doesn’t think just anyone calling him or herself a journalist ought to be able to work in South Carolina. Only ‘responsible’ journalists — those who pay to be registered and vetted by the state — should be allowed to cover presidential politics or any other kind of news.” What an idiot . . .
Borchers — and other proponents of civilian disarmament — doesn’t even know when he’s being trolled. South Carolina Rep. Mike Pitts’ South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law is a goof. He introduced the bill to make a point: the government has no more right to curtail Americans’ Second Amendment-protected right to keep and bear arms than its does to trample on journalists’ First Amendment protection of free speech.
By taking the bill seriously, Borchers was punked. Or was he? His article links to The Post and Courier of Charleston. Which includes this bit:
Pitts told The Post and Courier his bill is . . . to stimulate discussion over how he sees Second Amendment rights being treated by the printed press and television news. He added that the bill is modeled directly after the “concealed weapons permitting law.”
“It strikes me as ironic that the first question is constitutionality from a press that has no problem demonizing firearms,” Pitts said. “With this statement I’m talking primarily about printed press and TV. The TV stations, the six o’clock news and the printed press has no qualms demonizing gun owners and gun ownership.”
So Borchers had to have known the bill’s intent and intentionally misrepresented it to WaPo readers. Unless . . . he didn’t read the article. Which means Borchers is either another despicable WaPo anti-gun journo, or just a really lazy bastard. Both? They say never ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, but given the WaPo’s anti-gun rights animus, I’m going with the former. You?