One of my favorite woman writers, Alicia Colon, admits to being a cold-hearted conservative. Colon prefers arguments to emotion when deciding important issues.
She shares our distaste for politicians who drag in children instead of using reason and facts to make their points. Unfortunately, much of the current debate about guns is being fought along emotional lines, more fraught with emotion than facts. Colon writes:
This does not mean that I was not moved by the halting speech of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, survivor of a gunshot head wound by the crazed gunman in Tucson last January. I prayed for her and the other victims and it is very gratifying to see her recovering so spectacularly from that near fatal attack and I admire her strength and courage at her Congressional appearance.
Nevertheless, I fail to see how her appeal to Congress to do something about guns will have much impact on gun violence against innocent victims like herself and those at the Sandy Hook school. Of course, I am a cold-hearted Republican who found it somewhat despicable of the president to exploit the Newtown, Conn. massacre by having children present as he delivered his executive directives on gun control. These children supposedly wrote the president asking him to do something about guns. Oh really, they really did? As a mother of six, grandmother of eleven, I find that scenario somewhat suspect unless they had a lot of prodding from hyper anxious parents.
The problem with most of these tear-jerking maneuvers is that they are often a tissue of lies.
As examples untruths cloaked in emotion Colon cites the Joe Soptic "Romney killed my wife" ad and Parkinsons sufferer Michael J. Fox's claim that a certain senator was against stem cell research. Neither claim was true.
Colon dings one of my favorite tear jerkers, the New York Times’ “most neediest” stories. Almost always, on closer inspection, these stories prove to be based on a false premises.