Editorial

[funkychinaman]

Maybe you can put a student's perspective on it? After all, it was a shooting at a school that started all this. Maybe how these new measures won't help protect you or your fellow students?

[BeardedHoplite]

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

As a former editor-in-chief myself, I have to ask whether a high school paper is an appropriate forum for such an editorial. Most of your audience A) can't vote, and B) can't buy guns. Maybe you can submit it as an op-ed in local non-school paper?

I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for a paper that takes non-staff articles. I'm mostly writing the article to get out my opinion and to fight alot of myths I hear around school (we're close to a very anti-gun city, so it trickles down).

With luck, some kid'll take it to their parent and it'll influence them.

Originally Posted by funkychinaman

Maybe you can put a student's perspective on it? After all, it was a shooting at a school that started all this. Maybe how these new measures won't help protect you or your fellow students?

Hmm, that's a good idea, I'll see what I can re-write before the deadline next week. Thanks.

[funkychinaman]

Originally Posted by BeardedHoplite

I wouldn't even know where to begin to look for a paper that takes non-staff articles. I'm mostly writing the article to get out my opinion and to fight alot of myths I hear around school (we're close to a very anti-gun city, so it trickles down).

With luck, some kid'll take it to their parent and it'll influence them.



Hmm, that's a good idea, I'll see what I can re-write before the deadline next week. Thanks.

Maybe as a letter to the editor? Your position as head of the school paper might give you extra weight.

Maybe you can do a story on what measures your school has in place for such scenarios? (Assuming such measures exist.) As minors, you can't buy guns, you don't vote, or even pay taxes, but you do have the most to lose. Maybe politicians wouldn't suggested such half-assed, knee-jerk measures if it were THEIR lives on the line.

[BlackIce_GTS]

Maybe a little too technical? A lot of people tend to get hung up on the way anti-gunners are technically incorrect about nearly everything. While there's a point at which their ignorance becomes relevant (actual legal wording of things), it's not always helpful to make obvious corrections such as, clip vs. magazine, 'high capacity magazines' are really standard capacity, 'high powered rifles' (which they always say, because it sounds scarier) are really medium powered.
For example, it would be a good argument to say that I'm wrong and that it's impossible to have a proper discussion with one party being woefully uninformed on the issue*. And maybe that's true, but I think that the technical and physical realities of firearm aren't and shouldn't be the real issue here.
It would be a bad argument to say that I use commas incorrectly and my thought structure is chaos (which I'm sure as an editor you have noticed). Get what I'm saying?

Arguments (facts!) I like (not necessarily relevant to your article):
-Very very few crimes are committed using 'assault weapons'.
-Politicians behind these bills admit they will have little effect on crime.
-Magazine size restrictions will not help anything. You got that one.
-A lot of anti-gunners, Pierce Morgan especially, seems to think that 'assault weapons' are some kind of magical death ray. While they have features relevant to military usage, they're really not any more effective against a room full of people with no guns than anything else. (This isn't super useful because it says 'yeah they're all pretty deadly'. But it's a lot less possible to get away with banning all guns. The point is that the AWB is useless.)
-'Sporting purpose' is irrelevant, the supreme court says people have the right to commonly used military arms (link)
-If anyone brings up that in households with firearms, the most likely person to be injured is a family member (some wording like that), 90% of that statistic is suicides. Somebody else knows the stat I'm talking about, right?
People use it to make it look like guns are just inherently dangerous unstable things that will spontaneously kill everyone in the area and gun owners are panicky idiots who shoot at anything that moves, when in reality nearly all the injuries are intentional and self inflicted. Now the stat is all about suicide which is a completely different issue. Discussion Judo!

*why does that happen? People against abortion know all about abortions, people against drugs (well, some of them) know quite a lot about drugs, environmentalists know tons about the environment. People against guns know nothing about guns. It's weird and it results in bad laws.
(I really don't want to start a discussion on any of those topics, they're just examples.)