On May 6, the Tribune printed an AP story headlined " 'Good guys with guns' sometimes make honest mistakes." The story said "in a span of 48 hours in March the three [good guys] were responsible for gun safety lapses that put students in danger."
The authors go on to mention that the "nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA) revealed more than 30 publicly reported mishaps since 2014 [by officers and teachers on campuses]."
Let's break that down.
First of all, what difference does the GVA being nonprofit make? Nonprofit doesn't mean unbiased any more than does "nonpartisan." It's verbal misdirection.
Next, what is a mishap? In the entire story, only one student injury from a misfired round is confirmed and these "mishaps" go back to 2014.
The article notes the claim that there are 20,000 officers in the nation's schools, so 20,000 times an average 180 school days per year times - let's be generous and say just three full school years since 2014.
That means this "problem" comes down to 30 confirmed incidents out of 10.8 million chances for something to go wrong - that's 30/10,800,000.
Divide that out and you wonder why this article was written.
Yes, a wounded kid is serious but the article's subtext - incidents like these are a valid argument against armed resource officers - is shallow, partisan-driven propaganda aimed at manipulating readers into buying an argument that doesn't add up.
Of course, if the Tribune wants to con readers by publishing shallow, partisan-driven propaganda as front-page news, that is its absolute right - for now.
I say "for now" because our rights as protected by our Constitution are a closely woven fabric, and pulling at its threads can unravel more than one thinks.
You can see that destruction right now in our constitutional mother country, where a law known as Section 40 threatens to impose state regulation on the press.
And this affront is not just the work of British Prime Minister Theresa May and the Conservatives. According to The Spectator, "Labour and Liberal Democrat peers have been the most active in pushing for Section 40 to come into force."
Yes, their "marble cake" federal government doesn't have our checks and balances.
And, yes, the full protection of a Second Amendment has never been theirs but what rights they did have were stripped - leading to a rise in knife and acid attacks.
Their government's answer - warrantless stop and frisk searches.
For now, the U.S. Supreme Court has protected speech in this country, no matter how offensive.
Not so in the U.K. They have sacrificed that right to the idol of diversity. Hate speech is charged on police order, sans any private person filing a complaint.
Recently, police in Yorkshire threatened anyone who made fun of pot busts by the constabulary in Facebook posts. A driver about my age was arrested for flipping off a traffic cam. A comedian was fined for posting a stupid video of a dog saluting like a Nazi.
How could freedom of the press not be next?
We're well on the way to that end.
Speech codes and partisan pseudo-research are rampant on our campuses. As Heather MacDonald notes in "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences," the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are spending more time encouraging diversity than science or health.
MacDonald continued that somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on diversity. Now that academic victimology has established a beachhead at the agency, however, it remains to be seen whether the pace of such breakthroughs will continue.
Indeed, the very statistical reflection I applied to the AP story has been branded as racially insensitive by the diversity crowd.
No right is safe from this mob. They will parse victim status until everyone deemed "the other" is determined to be racist.
Like Burgess Meredith in "The Twilight Zone," you will be declared "The Obsolete Man."
The Tribune and the press in general need to remember the poem "First they came" by Martin Niemoller. You might be the last the mob will come for, but they will come.
Future Alfords could face running this paper under a US version of Section 40.
That's not the America I want my grandchildren to inhabit. I want them to be as free to speak and write and pray and think and defend themselves as am I.
What do you want?
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Hennigan, of Lewiston, is an instructional technology administrator at Lewis-Clark State College. His email address is t0by_belch@yahoo.com.
