Last week, Gersh Kuntzman of the "New York Daily News" published the article "What Is It Like To Fire An AR-15? It's Horrifying, Menacing And Very Very Loud." In this, Kuntzman described his experience of going into a gun store and handling the same weapon that has been the focus of a multitude of recent debates. The piece that he created, however, was the epitome of baiting.
Before I go any further, I feel it's necessary that I discuss my own views on gun control. I grew up in Wilton, Connecticut; Newtown is roughly 20 miles from my home. It probably won't come as a big surprise to anyone that I support gun control. That being said, what I don't support is baiting. With an issue as powerful and emotional as gun control, it's easy to know what kind of content is going to attract attention. Kuntzman described his experience as follows: "The recoil bruised my shoulder, which can happen if you don't know what you're doing. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary form of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable." While I would like to give Kuntzman the benefit of the doubt and believe that this account was totally truthful, I simply cannot.
I am currently a student at the Virginia Military Institute. Whether or not a student at VMI decides to commission into one of the four branches of the armed forces is entirely up to them; all cadets must go through military training, however, regardless of your commissioning status. Before I attended VMI, I had never handled, let alone shot, a rifle in my life. Since I've been at VMI, I have shot M16s and AR-15s multiple times (both of these rifles use the same type of ammunition and are almost identical in terms of how they feel when one fires them). Like Kuntzman, I was nervous to shoot my first rifle. I was lying on the ground with the butt of the rifle pressed into the outside of my chest, my trigger finger trembling slightly from the mixture of anticipation and anxiety that I felt.
What I feared the most was the very thing that Kuntzman wrote about: that as soon as I pulled the trigger I would feel an explosive force that would shake my entire body. What I actually got was nothing. Literally nothing. I pulled the trigger and I felt what may have been the equivalent of a toddler pushing on my chest. With ear protection on, the sound emitted from the rifle upon firing was barely audible. So when I stumbled upon Kuntzman's article last week while I was on the train, I was understandably annoyed. Here was a guy who was taking a very serious issue and misrepresenting the facts so that he could bait readers into viewing his article, all the while hiding behind the false appearance of having a noble agenda.
I have no issues with opinions. What I do hate is falsities. When an individual like Kuntzman creates a baiting article, they are fully aware of what they are doing. The response Kuntzman received was exactly what he wanted; his article was shared thousands of times and received over 100,000 views. He had a multitude of people attacking his words and his masculinity (a practice that I could not hate more, as it screams insecurity and immaturity), and his follow-up article addressing these comments is currently the most popular article on the New York Daily News website. Kuntzman's success only inhibits the progression of gun control, however. When you take an already compelling argument and use falsities as the foundation for it to lie on, you create an Achilles' heel that did not previously exist. Opposition to gun control can easily discredit his argument through the exposure of his exaggerations, and unfortunately few will care that these particulars have little to do with the real issue at hand.
Baiting as a whole does not bother me. I understand that at times we need to do what we can to get ourselves noticed. It's when baiting is used on very serious and very real issues that I have problem. Using false information to promote an important agenda only makes it harder for change to be accomplished, and maybe it's because of cases like this that we aren't progressing as a society.
