UK blogger Laban Tall is somewhat right-wing – but (or possibly ‘and’, to avoid charges of nonsequituring) he’s normally entirely fair and reasonable. You may be able to gauge from the previous sentence that I’m about to list a counterexample…
There’s a reasonable, if (to me) unconvincing argument that everyone ought to be allowed to have guns. There’s a reasonable argument that people shouldn’t. But no matter what your take on that debate is, the fact that the BBC may hire gunmen to protect its journalists in lawless war zones is in no way inconsistent with being opposed to the use of guns in general.
The current climate in warzones is different from anything experienced since the dawn of TV: one side genuinely no longer gives a fuck how it’s portrayed, and is therefore happy to slaughter journalists indiscriminately. There’s also a perception (I challenge someone with Chris Lightfoot’s patience and statistical ways to check the truth of this…) that the Allied side is also less willing than in the past to give journalists the benefit of the doubt.
In this context, unless you genuinely believe that a randomly chosen person in part X of Britain (assuming that said randomly chosen person isn’t a crack dealer) is even in the same magnitude of risk of violent death as a war journalist, the claim of hypocrisy here is nonsensical.
"There’s also a perception (I challenge someone with Chris Lightfoot’s patience and statistical ways to check the truth of this…) that the Allied side is also less willing than in the past to give journalists the benefit of the doubt."
i.e., that journalists are more likely to be killed by friendly (i.e. western) forces now than in the past? Maybe. Checking this in a reliable way would be pretty hard, but perhaps worth a try.
When ever How ever Whom ever End of story