Huntsville Times Sports Reporter Should Stick to Sports

We at FirearmsTruth don’t report much on sports. We’re not sports reporters, so we suggest that Sports Columnist Mark McCarter of The Huntsville Times should stick to covering baseball and basketball, and stay away from guns. He wrote a highly unfavorable column about Alabama’s legislation that allows people to keep firearms in their cars, with the insulting title ” Senate gun vote makes it easier for nut cases.”

As a reporter he actually says:

“I’m a big fan of the U.S. Constitution, even if that ‘well-regulated militia’ part before we get to ‘right to bear arms’ is outdated. I don’t happen to believe that having sensible gun control laws equates to ‘you can never hunt deer again.’”

Not only is McCarter’s point not exactly clear, and find the sentence a little too conversational, but is a journalist really saying part of the Constitution is outdated? Maybe he wouldn’t feel that way if this were a discussion of the First Amendment, the one that guarantees freedom of the press. This guarantee includes print, but also radio, TV and the Internet – the latter three not around when this document was written!

On another note, McCarter tries to throw in several facts and brings up this point:

“There was another short story in our paper that ran last summer. A Mobile police officer named Brandon Sigler was shot and killed. Richard Hollingsworth shot him with a weapon that had been stolen from a deputy’s car.”

We regularly do our “Who Guards the Guards” pieces here, and we note that many police officer’s do have their weapons stolen from their cars. This is unfortunate and this needs to change. We agree that cars make impractical long-term storage for firearms, but the point of this new law wasn’t about transporting guns in vehicles, it was about whether individuals could keep their guns in their cars at work. This could include gated or guarded parking lots. The point here is that the cars are an individual’s property, even if the vehicles are on an employer’s property. But clearly only “nuts” want to transport guns anywhere according to McCarter.