There’s a whole genre of journalism -- practiced with special vigor on the East and West coasts, as well as in the British Isles -- that revels in the manifest barbarism of those of us who live below the Mason-Dixon Line. “Those benighted Southerners are at it again!” they sniff.
House Bill 60 enabled them to engage the template: [Backward Southern state] does [predictably backward thing.]
“Flanked by members of his state’s legislature on Wednesday afternoon, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal proudly unveiled Georgia’s new official state slogan, ‘We Make Florida Look Safe,’” blogger Andy Borowitz giggled on The New Yorker’s website.
But the magazine was late to the party: The New York Times and the L.A. Times had already skewered the measure in previous editorials.
“The bill,” the NYT wrote, “will, among other things, allow people to carry concealed weapons into more places — including ones, like bars, which conveniently enough are spots where they are likely to be put to use.”
The LAT was less droll but no less pointed, labeling the measure “the recent gun madness in Georgia,” and blasting it as “full of absurdities.”
The Guardian, England’s bastion of liberalism, didn’t editorialize, but topped its news story today with critics who called the law “a recipe for unnecessary killing.” (Do we detect a note of anticipation?)
Now, you might think us paranoid for suggesting that Georgia and other Southern states attract more than their share of slings and arrows from the world’s press. So we decided to run a little experiment.
As it happens, yesterday also saw the governor of Kansas sign a gun law welcomed by the NRA and other Second Amendment advocates. Did it garner the same share of global attention?
Well, as of 8:30 a.m., a Google search for “Kansas gun law” turned up 92 news articles. “Georgia gun law” yielded 409.
Dividing one by the other yields a new AJC exclusive feature, the CSC (Crazy Southerner Coefficient). For this particular news event, the CSC (drum roll, please) is 4.45.
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