John Kelly

The Washington Post’s Metro columnist John Kelly has climbed aboard the gun control train once again. Usually Kelly's writing is non-controversial non-political fare about local Washington, D.C. history, but this week, his columns turned political. For Inauguration Day, he turned his column into a screed to attack out-of-towners for being dismissive of the District of Columbia's lack of voting representation in Congress.

Two days later, Kelly turned his pen to pushing for more stringent gun regulations, recounting the horrific story of Judith Cox, a housewife who killed her four children, then turned the gun on herself, on Valentine's Day 1964.

Leave it to a Washington Post book reviewer to find a way to blame George W. Bush for the Irish Potato Famine. Okay, Peter Behrens didn't do exactly that, but he used the occasion of reviewing two books about the mass starvation of millions of Irish in the 1840s as an opportunity to bash the Bush administration over the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.  Oh, I almost forgot, the bogeyman of the "free market" also finds itself in Behren's sights.

In his January 13 Washington Post item, Behrens reviewed two new books on the subject, The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy  and The Graves are Walking: The Great Famine and the Saga of the Irish People, by Tim Pat Coogan and John Kelly respectively. Behrens favorably accepted Coogan's conclusion that “it was British reluctance to interfere with the supposed workings of the free-market economy that allowed famine to continue in Ireland at a time when the country was producing and exporting tons of food to England.”

Updated below: Kelly replies via Twitter.

Washington Post Metro columnist John Kelly usually avoids controversial political subjects and often does "answer man" features about local D.C.-area history, making his feature overall an enjoyable read. But from time to time Kelly works in his liberal bias, just as when he bashed conservative talk show hosts as "right-wing nutjobs" and when he weighed in against the so-called Tebow bill that would allow homeschoolers to join local high school sports teams.

Today, Kelly offered an idea of his for a gun control measure but concluded by grousing that it probably would never get passed into law because those pesky "Second Amendment absolutists" would get in the way and so, "we'll just continue to accept that the price for having a well-regulated militia is that homicidal maniacs will be able to buy guns as easily as buying tickets to a movie."

Sheesh! What have taxpaying homeschooling parents ever done to the Washington Post?

There's a bill working its way through the Virginia General Assembly that would, if passed, require that public high schools in the Old Dominion allow homeschooled children to try out for athletic teams for the school which they would attend  were they enrolled in the public school system. Post staffer Anita Kumar reported on the issue in the February 6 paper. In the two weeks since then, Washington Post staffers and editors published three separate opinion pieces against the HB947, nicknamed the "Tebow Bill."