MSM Scumbag of the Month Award...

...goes to the Nashville Tennessean, who thoughtfully published a searchable database of all the CCW holders in Tennessee. This handily allows thieves, people under restraint for domestic violence, etc., to check whether their intended victims are armed!

Why do newspapers publish CCW lists? Well, it's not because they believe in the public's right to know. I spent years in a newsroom, typing away, and I can tell you from person experience that there is no more elitist environment on the planet than a newsroom. Members of the MSM see themselves as a pure cultural elite — smarter, more worldly, more articulate, more politically savvy than the proles outside the gates. The "public's right to know" is strictly limited to the information the media elite think the peasants "needs to know."

And that information must fit a narrow political agenda.

Let me give you an example, one that helped me end my career in the MSM. I've told this story before, but I think it's instructive n this context. I was working for a daily newspaper in Florida. I'd already done a lap of newspapers in the South, moving up each time I moved. I had what was pretty much a primo newspaper job, the top feature writer. I set my own assignments, kept my own hours, won awards, lived on the beach and in general tried (poorly) to emulate reporter Hildy Johnson in The Front Page.

So, a new desk editor started; we were told he'd been in prison, done his time, and we were instructed not to ask him for detail, because good little liberal believed that all prisoners were victims. Well, the reason I was an excellent reporter was that I had (and sadly still have) a monkey's curiosity; like the guy lying on the sidewalk staring up at the muzzle of Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum, "I gots to know."

So I took the new editor to dinner and kept chipping until he gave it up — he'd had "one of those days" when he just "lost it." I nodded...I've had those days. He said he could have just thrown something...or "strangle his cat"...strangle his cat? But his beloved fiance was there when he "lost it," so he beat her to death with claw hammer.

When the new editor began hitting on the women in the newsroom — lot of years playing "find the soap" in the prison shower! — I took each one aside and told her what the editor had been in the slam for. Predictably, the proverbial feces hit the proverbial F-5 tornado. I was called into the boss' office, threatened with immediate firing and black-balling from the industry and in general yelled and screamed at for an hour or so.

I pointed out that the editor's crime was public record...I'd looked it up. I knew all about public records. It's what I did. So what, yelled the boss? So what? Just because it was on the public record didn't mean I had the right to spread it all around the newsroom, causing a man who had "paid his debt to society" pain and suffering.

I said that until the editor's girlfriend crawled out of her grave, walked into the newsroom and told me it was all her fault, I would continue to make sure that my women friends didn't end up with a claw hammer for a fashion accoutremont after a bad date.

I walked out of that office still with my job and a much better understanding of what "right to know" really meant.

Newspapers publish CCW lists in the hopes of embarrassing/scaring people away from getting permits that can save their lives. At some level, the editors — catering to the same base instinct that causes some sick people to hope for high-speed wrecks at NASCAR races — hope that a crime will be committed, hopefully where a CCW holder is not able to defend him or herself from an attacker. Then the newspaper can do a story that says, see, guns don't work! If the CCW holders succeeds, well, then there isn't a story, is there?

Keep up the good work, guys! By the way, the asteroid's already hit and you're probably wondering about all that dust in the air...