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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

Tag Archives: assassination

Getting guns right, for what it’s worth

There is a natural law operating in Canadian media whereby the more knowledge you have of firearms, the more hilarious you find the press and TV reports that follow any prominent incident with guns. Sun News, for example, was quick to tell us after Tuesday night’s attack on the Parti Québécois victory party in Montreal that suspect Richard Henry Bain had been caught with “an automatic weapon.” Global News doubled down, arming Bain with a nonexistent “machine-gun.”

Hint: “LOL” doesn’t stand for Liberal Opposition Leader

Attention newspapers: trying to milk the Lee Harpey Oswald scandal for every possible ounce of news value may seem like fun now, but you do realize, don’t you, that we journalists will end up being bound by the standards of taste we’re all now blithely applying to partisan propagandists? The longer we countenance this grotesque farce, the more likely it is that editorial cartoonists will eventually be forbidden by custom from drawing statesmen with knives sticking out of their backs. (It’s a direct reference to assassination! How dare you?) This is a problem, since the code of their profession requires them to do so a minimum of five times a year. (I think it’s in the handbook right after the “Dead celebrities being greeted by St. Peter” quota.)