The RedStar wrote an article about how the $100 fee for applying for a concealed carry permit was costing some counties money. My thoughts:

3-23-04; Another great reporting job by the Strib staff! So an anti-concealed carry group picks the three largest (and most inefficient?) Minnesota counties to “find” that it costs more than the $100 fee to process carry permit requests. What about the other 84 counties? No mention of the fact that the workload in these three counties was unusually high because they previously arbitrarily denied almost all requests? No checking to see if they were doing way more background research than other counties, possibly with the express purpose of being able to whine about the cost? No checking to see if the rate of rescissions of permits were higher or lower than the other counties? What about the rate of denials, higher or lower? How much of the cost of those checks is politically motivated accounting of the time required to run them? In a fourth county (Ramsey), stats are quoted that 37 people out of 47 total denials were because of a determination that the applicant was “likely to cause harm to himself or others.” Did any of them appeal? Denied or approved? Since they are described as gun owners, do they still have the gun? Have any of those 37 done anything to corroborate this finding? Has anybody even checked? Why was Ramsey County singled out for reporting the number of denials and the reason for 37 of them? Was that rate unusually high or low? I am not finding fault with the Ramsey County Sheriff, just with the apparent lack of desire by anyone connected with the paper to write a real story rather than just do a press release for an anti-gun group (Citizens for a Safer Minnesota) and the sheriffs of three counties that opposed the concealed law in the first place. Isn’t it just possible that the bias against the concealed carry law by those people has something to do with this propaganda? Also, does anyone in this state believe that a if a similar “report” were to find say, ten counties were making money on the $100 fee, but it was released by the NRA, would it get this kind of friendly, fluffy article from the Strib? Your paper claims over and over that it is not biased, but you never ask the hard questions of liberal groups like these, and because nearly everybody there agrees with those groups, nobody at the Strib even recognizes your own bias! Also, your reporters never dig very deep on any subject- they just print whatever propaganda they are handed, and since they are always sent to the liberal loony group to get the story, the “rebuttal” is almost always limited to one short line from the other side. That means they are either too stupid to recognize BS when they are swimming in it, or they don’t write the other side of the story because they know the editors will refuse to print any of it or they have been ordered not to bother. Just what is the Strib policy on soft news like this? I define soft news as anything released by any interest group no matter how wide or narrow a spectrum, any politician, government official, sports team, entertainer, think tank, research group, or even experts and professors. The Strib policy should be that none of these should be given an unchallenged forum. Every thing they say must be assumed to be self-serving, biased propaganda and most of your time and energy should be spent trying to find the lies inherent in all of those releases before they are printed. If you habitually refused to print this kind of crap verbatim, and exposed the hypocrisy of virtually every group out there, maybe they would stop trying to get you to print this junk.