{"id":481,"date":"2004-01-07T09:12:09","date_gmt":"2004-01-07T09:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/?p=481"},"modified":"2004-01-07T09:12:09","modified_gmt":"2004-01-07T09:12:09","slug":"on-shooting-straight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2004\/01\/on-shooting-straight\/","title":{"rendered":"On shooting straight"},"content":{"rendered":"

The letters page<\/a> at Romenesko is buzzing with talk over whether reporters should carry guns in war zones. Comments I most appreciated:<\/p>\n

From Bryan J. O’Connor:
The best advice I’ve ever heard on the topic came from a Latin American correspondent I knew in the ’80s, who spent time covering the El Salvador conflict and had run into more than one group of rifle-toting thugs. “So,” I asked, “what do you do when someone’s pointing a gun at you in the jungle?” His response: “Don’t be a smart-ass.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And another from Craig Pyes, who says it’s not about being pro-gun so much as pro-saving your skin: <\/p>\n

But practically, you don’t pack a gun unless you’re prepared to use it. Anybody versed in martial arts knows that any mental hesitation is the open door to your destruction against a prepared enemy. For a journalist to kill seamlessly and instantaneously, would require disciplined practice and training. And this is clearly not in the J school curriculum. And even if you were so trained, how can you enter an unfamiliar cultural context and understand the language, or the nuances of the language, or the
\ninvisible meta-language, which impel acts of violence?
\n

\nFaced with such ambiguity, does your mind now go to your weapon? If you don’t have the weapon, it won’t. It will focus you on the situation. After all, our job is not to kill antagonists, but to report on them quick.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My sense of the discussion is that veterans who’ve survived covering multiple conflicts understand that carrying a gun makes you a combatant. Just a matter of whether you’re willing to live (and die) with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The letters page at Romenesko is buzzing with talk over whether reporters should carry guns in war zones. Comments I most appreciated: From Bryan J. O’Connor:The best advice I’ve ever heard on the topic came from a Latin American correspondent…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}