Extreme views triggered by gun violence debate

The NRA was excoriated over a website message pointing out (accurately but also needlessly) that the president's daughters are protected with armed officers and no parent should have to worry about unprotected children. This message was characterized by news reporters (as opposed to commentators) as a personal attack on Barack Obama.

We haven't heard those journalists express the same concerns about personal attacks on NRA officials or politicians who generally support gun rights and uphold the Second Amendment. Why, for example, was there no outrage over Donald Kaul's mainstream media assault on the NRA? Kaul, former Des Moines Register columnist, briefly came out of retirement after Newtown to write that the NRA should be declared a terrorist organization.

He also suggested Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner should be tied “to the back of a Chevy pickup truck” and dragged across a parking lot “until they saw the light on gun control.” For those who refused to give up their guns, Kaul wrote on Dec. 29, “that ‘prying the guns from the cold, dead hands' thing works for me.”