Last month, Brady Campaign board member Heidi Yewman wrote a treacly, self-serving article for Ms. magazine entitled “My Month with a Gun.” Supposedly, she was going buy a gun and spend a month living like one of us, as if gun owners were a herd of smelly exotic animals. The article was meant to be a series, but Ms. chose not to publish any installments after the first. She collected the concluding parts in a Daily Beast article published today.
The whole thing is about as condescending as it sounds. Case in point:
Walking into the kitchen to refresh our drinks, I noticed my purse with the 9mm Glock still inside it. I’d forgotten to lock it up! Panic set in as I realized my teen son was playing videogames just 10 feet away. (…) I played two tennis matches with the gun in my backpack next to the court, and I went to three parties in homes where children played just feet from the pile of guests’ jackets and purses, including mine with the gun inside.
If she can’t be trusted to conduct herself like a grown-up, then how can anyone?
A few of her friends simpered and fawned in approval, but Yewman isn’t about to hear from those of us who carry firearms responsibly. While many gun owners jumped in to criticize her for being irresponsible (an assertion backed up by her own claims), she retreated and claimed that she was harassed and intimidated.
I was called an “idiot,” “stupid,” “immoral,” “clueless,” “a coward,” and “dangerous.” One woman suggested I put the gun in my mouth and pull the trigger–and several tried to reveal my home address on the moderated comments section.
Really? I don’t see that in any of the public comments. If those statements had actually been made, I’ve no doubt she would have published them. In fact, that would have been ammunition to prove that we’re the dangerous people she claims us to be.
She simply lost the argument and chose to lie about why. She goes so far as to quote Arthur Kellerman’s infamous (and discredited) claim that a gun kept in the home is 43 times more likely to harm one of the occupants than it is an intruder. The delicious irony is that the link she gives to his study is a GunCite article debunking it.
Having failed to create the moral panic she’d hoped to, she chose to give the gun over to an artist for smelting into a metal sculpture. I think we’re all safer for that, especially considering her closing thought.
I didn’t have to worry that one day I would get a diagnosis or have a personal crisis and have a gun on hand to turn on myself.
I’d like to think she learned something, but that was never the point.