Yes Men

The Washington Post finally published a letter concerning its reporting on open carry in Virginia. However, the rather feckless letter does little to challenge the Post's position on the issue.

No one is contesting their right to carry pistols in the open. But choosing to do so is gratuitously confrontational and borderline immature. Their need to display their weapons in Starbucks for supposed self-defense reasons is laughable.

The writer, Stephen Charnoff is a very young attorney with the small Alexandria, VA (liberal D.C. suburb) law firm of Carter & Coleman. You would think an attorney would know something about the law (or the facts) before so publicly making a pronouncement such as this. In fact, in the Starbucks incident, no one claimed that the guns were worn for self defense purposes. Rather, the two individuals had just returned from a session at the NRA Range and instead of leaving unsecured firearms in their car they chose to wear them in to the store. Not possessing concealed handgun permits they simply had no other choice. To say their actions are gratuitously confrontational, not to mention immature, makes no sense in light of Virginia’s very clear law on concealed carry.

I know I submitted a short letter to the Post challenging their position (I'll post it here tonight) and I am pretty sure other Virginian’s did as well. For the Post’s editors to simply ignore these letters and only publish a single letter reaffirming their own biases shows a pronounced lack of interest in reasonably advancing the dialogue over firearms ownership and possession.

As most consultants will tell you, surrounding yourself with Yes Men will only lead to serious long term problems as your ideas simply wallow around in a stale, shallow pool, of brain matter. It is a flaw many bad politicians (Bill Clinton, Trent Lott) have succumbed to and a trap management consultants’ continually recommend against falling into.


Intelligent people appreciate and respect the vigorous exchange of ideas, understanding that those lively debates ensure continued intellectual advancement. Clearly, the Washington Post's isn’t interested in this exchange of ideas. The Post’s continued preference for Yes Men is one of the main reasons it is utterly nugatory on this and many other serious public policy issues.