OK. \u00a0Deep breath. \u00a0It’s game time.<\/p>\n
I tried twice yesterday to get through a piece by Rochester TV reporter Devin Bartilotta of WTTC television in Rochester. \u00a0There were two references to “Packing Heat” in the first ten seconds of the report; I just couldn’t go on.<\/p>\n
But with that out of the way, it wasn’t a complete lost cause:<\/p>\n
Bartilotta:<\/p>\n
BCA data indicates a 312 percent increase in the number of permits issued to women from 2011 to 2013 in the zip code zones that are mostly in Olmsted County. In 2011, 122 permits were issued to women in that area. In 2012, the number jumped to 134. Then in 2013 it nearly doubled to 381 permits. 36 percent of those permits issued to women in 2013 were issued to women who were younger than 40-years-old. Those numbers are still dwarfed by the more than 1,200 men who got permits in 2013 in the same area.<\/p>\n
Lisa Polowski, who processes the gun permits in Olmsted County, says the national 2013 firearm bump could be prompted by the 2012 shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut.<\/p>\n
“Things like that in society were really feeding into this, that people really feel the need to protect themselves\u201d Polowski said. “Our numbers went up by probably 60 percent for a permit to purchase.”<\/p>\n
But in generally safe and quiet Southeast Minnesota, women might still feel threatened.<\/p>\n
“Self defense is what it boils down to,\u201d said Marquette.<\/p>\n
“Many times it’s an equalizer. Because many times their attackers are bigger, stronger, and this may help them,\u201d Bierly said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
OK, after a couple of false starts, that’s not bad. \u00a0And incredibly, we actually saw a news report about a Minnesota that doesn’t bring in an obligatory comment from the useless Heather Martens – perhaps an advantage to getting news from a Greater Minnesota outlet.<\/p>\n
So that’s all to the good.<\/p>\n
We almost made it to the end without another clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n
I said almost:<\/p>\n
But in an increasingly violent world, the need for personal protection is putting more women on target.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ms. Bartillota – does that sentence actually mean anything? <\/p>\n
To the extent it does, it’s wrong; the idea that the world is getting more violent is, like “packing heat”, another media clich\u00e9 – and unlike “packing heat”, it actually does some harm.\u00a0\u00a0 The world is not “increasingly violent”. \u00a0Violent crime is plummeting – in the parts of the country where guns are least “controlled”, anyway, where violent crime is off by half in the past twenty years.<\/p>\n
But hey, at least we got to the end!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK. \u00a0Deep breath. \u00a0It’s game time. I tried twice yesterday to get through a piece by Rochester TV reporter Devin Bartilotta of WTTC television in Rochester. \u00a0There were two references to “Packing Heat” in the first ten seconds of the report; I just couldn’t go on. But with that out of the way, it wasn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51026"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51084,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51026\/revisions\/51084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}