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The Read Menace

...leaving community hurt, too

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Here's the headline from yesterday's Strib: "Girl, 6, is grazed by bullet, leaving community hurt, too."

It's tempting just to let that stand as one more blob in the insipid lump of goo that is the Star Tribune. OK, I will, but with just one comment: Doesn't every bullet that hits a six-year-old hurt our community?

I wish I had such an overstaffed news room that I could send a reporter out to the scene of a shooting to ask everyone who lives near the incident what they think of a little girl getting shot. What do they expect people to say? "Hey, no big deal. People get shot here all the time. What really makes me mad is the Twins letting Johan Santana get away."

Actually, there was one detail of the Strib story that's kind of funny. The assailant's gun went off because his pants were so loose that the gun slipped down his pants leg and discharged when it hit the floor. How much funnier would the headline have been if the gun had hit with the muzzle pointed straight up?

"Man, 20 or so, grazed by bullet, leaving future generations hurt, too."

1 Reader Comments

Anonymous (not verified)02:14pm
Feb 15
I suppose you'll be accused of writing from one of those everything-is-a-joke communities. The headline caught my eye, too, as trite beyond words. The fact is, you wouldn't want a budget that would allow you to poll the neighbors, and had you such a budget, it would only fuel the despondence over acts of stupidity and inane use of language to give senseless crime some personal meaning.

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