There’s a new gun store slated to open its doors in New Braunfels, Texas, but a local reporter seems intent on trying to create a controversy over its location. MySA.com’s Victoria Lopez recently published a story entitled “New Braunfels debates safety of gun shop close to elementary school” in which she claims a gun store will soon be opening “feet away from an elementary school”.
In actuality, Armed in America Firearms is located several blocks away from Lamar Elementary, which is readily apparent just by checking Google Maps.
The red pin in the upper left is Armed in America’s location. The grey dot with the mortarboard cap is the location of Lamar Elementary. According to Google Maps, the new shop is actually about 2,640 feet away from the elementary school; hardly the next-door neighbor that Lopez insinuates.
To make matters worse, Lopez based her entire story on a single complaint from an anonymous user of Reddit.
One month into the school year, Texans across the region have seen dozens of school threats. As the troubling rate rises, one Texas Hill Country resident flagged a potential danger with a gun store opening feet away from an elementary school – locals had opposing thoughts.
The concerned New Braunfels resident expressed concern about the gun shop opening on Union Avenue near Lamar Elementary School. User GuadaComaProgress shared how they felt the proximity to the school was not only “reckless but also foreshadows something unthinkable, which we have unfortunately seen far too often.”
Just this week, a Kerrville 10-year-old was arrested for making ‘hoax’ threats. Earlier this month, another person was arrested for making threats to four districts across the Hill Country.
Lopez at least acknowledged (albeit several paragraphs into the completely unnecessary story) that “nearly all 60 commenters in the thread saw no issue with the business’s location.”
You can read the thread for yourself here, but I couldn’t find any other complaints about the location of the new shop beyond the one from GuadaComaProgress.
Despite the complete lack of controversy or concern in the Reddit thread, Lopez still decided for some reason to contact the New Braunfels Independent School District and Armed in America Firearms for “comment on the Reddit post and the recent school threats.”
The most generous explanation for Lopez’s report is that she was just struggling to find something to write about on a slow news day stumbled across the nearly week-old thread on the New Braunfels subreddit. Even if that was the case, however, there was no need for sensationalizing the gun shop’s location or her awkward attempt to tie its opening to the online and phoned-in threats to schools located beyond the city limits. I get the feeling that Lopez was hoping to create a stir with her report, sparking a controversy where none exists.
If Lopez really wanted to report this non-story in an accurate and even-handed manner, it should have been titled “Reddit user complains about gun shop’s location, but finds no support online”. Lopez should have detailed that the shop is located a half-mile from the elementary school in question, not “feet away”. She could even have reached out to the Guada-Coma Progressive Coalition to see if the group was responsible for the Reddit post, and if so, to get a reaction from the group’s leadership about their failed attempt to cause alarm about Armed in America Firearms’ latest location.
While Lopez did include several of the rebukes from Redditors in her story, the premise that New Braunfels is “debating the safety” of the gun shop’s location isn’t supported by her reporting. One complaint and dozens of supporters isn’t a debate. It’s the anonymous ranting of an online crank that was quickly shut down by everyone else in the thread. That’s hardly newsworthy, but by trying to turn a molehill into a mountain, Lopez made her reporting a story of its own.
Read the full article here
