Shorter Gawker: Pedophilia's Just Another Sexual Orientation, Gun Owners, Those Are the Real Wackos!

So let's get this straight. According to the folks at Gawker, pedophilia may well be just another sexual orientation that should not be illegal. But college kids owning guns and living in gun-friendly dorms, well, that's just plain craziness.

In a dismissive post published yesterday afternoon, Gawker's Mallory Ortberg scoffed that, at least so far, no one was clamoring to move into a planned dorm at the University of Colorado which will be open only to students who are at least 21 years old and who have concealed-carry permits:

Why would some of these students choose to stay in their current living situations? Some of them are undoubtedly too busy clicking their spurs together and shooting multiple revolvers into the air, Yosemite Sam-style, to have heard the news. Others may be buried underneath a pile of commemorative, pearl-handled shooters purchased at the most recent gun show, unable to reach the door. At least two are currently building a recreation of the Fortress of Solitude off-campus in the nearby woods, crafting a sleek, silent Gun Palace where they will never again have to explain to their bemused RAs why they choose to own guns or submit to being corralled into weaponized dorm zones. With cobalt-blue bolt bedframes and state-of-the-art pistol slide door hinges, the Gun Palace is the only choice for the discriminating CU gun owner.

The Gun Palace is slated for completion in Spring 2014. Residents will be selected by lottery.

A review of other posts filed under the topic tag "gun control" on Gawker show a decidedly anti-gun rights slant to the Website, for example, this item from August 24 by Erin Gloria Ryan attacking Jan Brewer for correctly noting that the vast majority of gun owners are law-abiding citizens who do not use them to commit crimes or take lives:

Wow, what an asshole. To follow that line of reasoning, we should probably get rid of the driver's license requirement, speed limits, and center lines on roads because 99.9% of drivers are responsible about what side they're supposed to drive on and when they should pass. Let's also get rid of prescription requirements for addictive drugs like Xanax and Valium, because 99.9% of people who use them do so responsibly.

I'm sure that thought — that only 0.1% of gun owners are irresponsible fire-into-a-crowd types — is incredibly comforting to the victims of the Aurora shooting, or the Empire State Building shooting, or the families of people who died when that guy shot Gabrielle Giffords. It also must be comforting for the hundreds of families in Chicago — in mostly poor, Black, Mexican, or Puerto Rican neighborhoods — who are currently dealing loss or permanent injury of a loved one thanks to gun violence.

By contrast, as my colleague Noel Sheppard noted back in September, Gawker West Coast editor Cord Jefferson filed a story that was sympathetic to an argument being furthered by some that "[P]edophilia is an illness deserving of the public's sympathy...pedophilia is a sexual orientation."

Raping children is an illness deserving of sympathy, but wanting to be afforded your constitutional rights to self defense is in callow disregard of victims of criminal violence? Seriously, Gawker?