A bunch of English Lit 001 books and Director of Content Kate Lee (courtesy medium.com)

Medium is the brainchild of Twitter founder and billionaire-to-be Evan Williams. I think it’s supposed to be a blend of Twitter, Reddit and a blog. Or maybe Pinterest, Digg and Tumblr. It’s impossible to say right now. At the moment, only a small group of invitees can create content. “What we’re doing is ordering things by our best guess of the relative quality/interestingness of the different items,” Ev avers, “according to the people who have seen them.” Medium contains a section called Gun Rights & Wrongs, Debating Guns in America. It’s edited by Kate Lee, Medium’s Director of Content and self-proclaimed Newspaper Nazi. Checking the page, there’s not much doubt about which side of the “debate” Ms. Lee prefers . . .

The home page for GR&W has four “recommended” articles.

Barrel of a Gun was written by a Medium staff member Jason Stirman. His tale of being a brandishee contributes precisely nothing to the “gun debate,” save the assertion that being on the wrong end of a gun is some majorly scary sh*t.

Of “Monsters’ and Brothers makes a lot of excellent points about mental health care in these here United States. Too bad author Chantel Garrett can’t resist a cheap shot at, and mischaracterization of, the NRA’s position.

Before I do this, it’s necessary to first point out that the NRA’s call for a database of ‘monsters,’ among other hideous suggestions that assume that events like Newton can be prevented by merely keeping guns away from people with mental disorders, is both unrealistic and unhelpful to finding real solutions.

Dr. Dustin W Ballard’s The Bullet as Pathogen attempts to propagate the “gun violence as a public health crisis” meme, which argues for gun control laws and lots of ’em.

And consider the booming and mostly unregulated gun show industry, which makes it remarkably easy to purchase firearms, including excessively deadly ones (like the TAC-50 sniper rifle – which has a kill range of nearly two miles). Gun shows thrive despite evidence that regulating them (as California has done) decreases illegal sales and despite the knowledge that Mexican drug cartels are buying thousands of powerful weapons at U.S. gun shows.

Richard Abate’s Losing My Brother is as ancient (in internet terms) as it is predictable in its pro-gun control perspective.

Think of my brother tomorrow if you were his friend or part of his family, or if you are just reading this because you know me through a Facebook connection. Think of everything about him that is not what I described above, because he deserves our purist memory of his life. But on May 26, honor him by writing your senator and/or congressman and put background checks back on the table.

So Ms. Lee has front-and-centered two pro-civilian disarmament articles, one slanted in that direction and one that offers some excellent bullet points [sic] on mental health treatment.

There are four more “latest” articles beneath these on the Gun Rights & Wrongs home page. The first tells us “why Jerry Brown should sign the LIFE Act” (he didn’t). My Very Innocent Guns uses that headline sarcastically. Dear America wants to know why The Land of the Free is pro-gun—although the author’s not really interested. Why I Need My Gun at Starbucks is satire.

Total tally: seven out of eight articles are anti-gun. Not much of a debate is it? Oh and Medium doesn’t provide a comments section. The website might recover from this inauspicious start as it “allows” the general public to chime in with articles and elevate the ones they, the readers, consider worthwhile. Given Ms. Lee’s overall control of the content, at the moment, I’m rooting against it.

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40 COMMENTS

  3. Seriously? The Tac 50 has a kill range of 2 miles? Who the hell can actually take a shot that long? The longest shot ever taken doesn’t even come close and that was by a trained sniper in fairly good shooting conditions.

        • I can’t find the story but I think one armored car was shot in Georgia with no fatalities from the .50. If I remember right there were only a handful of crimes committed with .50 cal and no deaths.

    • Chuck Norris. Did it with a 10/22 if memory serves.

      (Chuck Norris is the only person to have ever smelled an actual unicorn fart)

    • I’m still trying to figure out how you can tell which guns are the “excessively deadly ones”. There must be gun-goldilocks that can tell you which ones are just the right amount of deadly.

  4. All these idiots have ZERO background in firearms ,so they KNOW NOT WHAT THEY TALK ABOUT since they do NOT have a resume we must assume they are IGNORANT of the topic and therefore lead NO CREDANCE to expertise on the topic,And THEREFORE are not to be even given any say on the topic asNON OF THEM ARE EXPERTS,but they want to give you there opinion anyway.My children did that when they were young and I thought it so cute,but now they are ADULTS and the GREW UP,as these folks have not accomplished that yet.
    Another point of contention we should bring up is ;PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS.We will give you signs to put up at your personal residence stating;ATTENTION PUBLIC ;WE BANISH GUNS FROM OUR RESIDNACE ,WE DON’T BELIEVE IN THEM AND YOU WILL FIND NONE HERE! If they will do that then I would respect them cause that is gutsy[but they won’t do that will they].So Mr and Mrs. ‘I HATE GUNS’ give us your resume and put up some signs or[let me exercise my first amendment rights] SHUT UP!

    • Just a SUGGESTION: you MIGHT want to TAKE it EASY on the ALL CAPS. THEN you won’t SEEM like a RAVING LUNATIC.

  7. Ms. Lee looks like another smug hateful b!tch I would like to get to know in a Biblical way. . . . . .

      • Note that I said “another” and failed to use the word “replace”. No, Mrs. Watts may be interested to learn I have signed her up for a threesome. We are gonna play stuff the reverse oreo cookie. 🙂

  8. Maybe if/when they open it up there’ll be some really good pro-gun/pro-rights writing on the site. Who knows, maybe by this time next year the content on their Most Recommended board for “Gun Rights and Wrongs” will read a lot like the front page of TTAG.

    Or maybe they’ll find a way to make sure their “democratic” content engine runs only on the refined emissions of arthouse intellectuals. It wouldn’t surprise me if they found they couldn’t relinquish control of their little conversational garden.

  11. If you look at the content of Medium, it is completely full of all the utterly debunked claims. It is laughable

  12. I went down their rabbit hole for a while. The one guy claimed to have a PhD in literature. His writing reminded me of a 10 year old with ADHD.
    How many kids with ADHD does it take to change a light bulb?
    Wanna go ride bikes?

    Now I’m back among the intelligent folks.

    • my ex-wife has a PhD. And bad credit. and makes poor lifestyle choices. and is divorced again. with a small child. living in a one bedroom apt. in DC. and in charge of a not-for-profit after she didn’t get tenure at a prestigious university. and the not for profit is highly dependent on the resource-rich (or not) enclave of Washington DC (the city, not the feds). and it provides education to kids in the criminal system. at a cut-throat rate. did I mention the bad credit? and she has a best friend/b!tch of a friend (don’t worry – this chick is safe from my attention, as she has a communicable disease), who was just convicted of stealing $$ from Cook County. . . .

      as you can see, a PhD is not necessarily a positive quality.

      • Dirk, I’m not positive but I think you may have been married to my ex wife, depending on time frame, they sound exactly alike minus the Cook county thing, although one never knows she may have made new friends.

  16. I have an account at Medium. Happy to crowd source an article from the Armed Intelligentsia, but you can leave that sexist shit at the door.

  18. What I don’t like about Medium is that it isn’t indexed–on purpose from what I gather–but is instead this pseudo-organic structure of “recommendations” to link from one article to another to another. My daughter has a number of articles published on her page (no, nothing about guns or politics)–and I could only find it because she gave me a direct link. There is no search function as far as I can ascertain (which to me is pretty lame). Her complaint is that the site has been taken over by geek developers with their barely grammatical geek speak and self-adulation that appeals to a very narrow audience. So I am more than a little surprised that TTAG found anything posted there at all.

  19. I’ve had access to write on Medium for over a year. I’m now inspired to write a pro-gun post. btw: I’ve known Ev for many years.

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