Recently, in the magazine Guns & Ammo, readers were surprised to find an editorial endorsing gun control. To be more specific, they were not generally pleasantly surprised either. The backlash was so bad, in fact, that the contributing editor who wrote the editorial has been fired, and the magazine's editor has apologized for including the editorial in the issue at all.
The whole situation is, on many levels, unfortunate. The magazine's editor seems to have believed that the readers would appreciate debate on a relevant issue, and he wasn't irrational to believe it. The editorial was not anti-gun, but only presented an argument for some sort of restrictions on who can own a gun and how easy it is to get one. Unfortunately, it seems the average reader wasn't quite able to muster the appreciation expected.
In the end, it seems that the decision to publish the editorial has to be seen as a mistake from a practical standpoint. The magazine did not know its audience well enough to anticipate their lack of appreciation. The editor's apology suggests this wasn't any sort of stand on principle in any case. In the end, it's unfortunate how badly it panned out but not exactly surprising.
One on hand, I understand why subscribers were so upset with the inclusion of an editorial endorsing presenting pro-gun control arguments. After all, they are paying their hard-earned money to receive a magazine every month they expect to affirm their beliefs.
ReplyDeleteOn the other, they perpetuated the close-minded, gun-totin' stereotype of Guns & Ammo readers. Healthy, educated debates can only help spur new ideas and help participants reach a conclusion sooner. Of course, that would require all of the middle-aged men involved to stop acting like tantrum-prone 2-year-olds.
Like you mentioned, this is a good example of why publications need to know their audiences. Maybe if the anti-gun control crowd was capable of listening to–not necessarily accepting–a view other than their own, this wouldn't have been blown so far out of proportion.
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function" - F. Scott Fitzgerald