Paul Bedard at The Washington Examiner reported that potential GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee finds the media “laughable” and sometimes playing the “idiot” role when covering America and his probable campaign. The media are out of touch with "Bubbaville." His new book God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy comes out on Tuesday.
On guns, he writes of how he was interviewed by the Associated Press in his first, 2008, presidential bid and the topic came up. “One of the editors turned the conversation to gun control, saying matter-of-factly and with a certain tone of harrumph in her voice, ‘Well, surely, you agree that we ought to ban ‘semi automatic’ weapons because no one needs a semi automatic gun to go hunting.’”
He recalls first being stunned by the ignorance on how the guns work and who uses them, then explained to the reporter that he hunts ducks with his semi-auto shotgun and that the AR-15 shoots a cartridge that is less powerful than a typical deer load.
“That’s a laughable moment to people in circles I run in,” he told [Bedard].
Huckabee seems to take pleasure in shaking up the mainstream media, and explains that it can sometimes help him make his point that the media and Washington ignore “bubbas” in what he terms “the flyover country” between the East and West Coasts, the so-called "bubbles."
In a chapter on "Guns And Why We Have Them," the former governor of Arkansas recalled an interview with then-NBC morning host Katie Couric two days after a school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas on March 26, 1998. She wrapped up by swinging at the South:
COURIC: Governor Huckabee, this is the third deadly shooting to take place in the South in the last five months. And some criminal experts have ventured a guess that southern society, which has a more permissive attitude towards guns and hunting, and perhaps in some circles even glamorizes those things, that that might have been a factor in some--in this recent spade of shootings. What's your view of that?
HUCKABEE: I take strong exception to that kind of view. Southerners may have a very positive view toward the ownership of firearms and even hunting, but we don't have a positive view about murder, and we certainly don't have a positive view toward murder in a schoolyard. I would remind everyone that Colin Ferguson got on a train in Long Island, shot 39 people. That wasn't Long Island, Arkansas. And so I think it's ridiculous to suggest that the southerners are more susceptible to violence than anybody else in the country. I would--I would have to take issue with that.
“Katie cut to a break and the interview was over,” Huckabee recalled. He added:
“I’m still a bit sensitive when someone from Bubble-ville tries to portray those of us in flyover country as being ‘in love with guns.’ I’m not at all in love with guns. I love freedom. I love my country and the Constitution. I love my family and would sacrifice my life to protect them. I would sacrifice someon else’s life if that person tried to harm mthem. If a gun helps me protect them better than I could with my bare hands or a knife, or by swinging a bat, or flailing away with a zucchini squash, I’ll unapologetically use a gun. Any questions?”
