LETTER: Ann Coulter’s credibility

To the Editor: Ann Coulter’s column, “Amazing New Way to Reduce Mass Shootings!” (Frontiersman Feb. 25) is so over the top, in its disregard for truth, common sense and decency, that one hardly knows where to start. But let’s start by asking how credible she is, in general, so that we can judge how seriously to take her claims. 1. “The typical American shooter is a young man with paranoid schizophrenia – or, as we’re now euphemistically calling it, ‘autism’…” Autism is not a euphemism for schizophrenia; they are completely different disorders. She could learn that by spending five minutes with any mental health professional, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the standard diagnostic manual). 2. According to Coulter, we are “dumping millions of psychotic and terrorist foreigners on the country.” Really? Millions of psychotic and terrorist foreigners? It sounds like a bad zombie movie. Moving on to her cases, let’s be charitable and say that she seems to be cherry-picking. For example, there is no excuse for not including the Las Vegas shooter, known (from many sources) to be an American white man with no obvious signs of mental illness. And if we really care about the problem of murder, it makes no sense to exclude the “man kills family, then himself” cases, not to mention the enormous numbers of other homicides that don’t meet the “mass shooting” criterion. No matter how we define the problem, we can’t solve it by pointing fingers at some “other” group of people. Coulter is only encouraging irrational fear and hatred of immigrants and Muslims. Not to mention fear of people with mental disorders. Why is she even being given a column? It reads like something from an alt-right version of the National Inquirer.

— ​Phil Somervell

Palmer​