Arts & Culture

Online mob sends country star scurrying for cover

Bob CollinsBob Collins Apr 17, 2015
23

A civil war in the country music world this week is highlighting what happens when people aren’t interested in things like facts and details.

Country star Tim McGraw helped organize and will headline a July benefit concert in Hartford, Connecticut, for an organization called Sandy Hook Promise, which helps people recognize “the early warning signs, symptoms and behaviors of at-risk individuals and how to intervene to help them from hurting themselves or others.”

That would be people like Adam Lanza who fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members at the Connecticut school in 2012.

Whoa! Too hot for the country world to handle.

The Breitbart site claimed — wrongly, it needs to be stressed — that it was a “gun control fundraiser.”

gun_violence

McGraw’s fiddle player, Dean Brown, is a close friend of Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son Daniel was killed in the attack.

The usual online lynch mob ensued, even though McGraw tried to dampen the pitchfork crowd in his statement to the Washington Post.

“Let me be clear regarding the concert for Sandy Hook given much of the erroneous reporting thus far. As a gun owner, I support gun ownership. I also believe that with gun ownership comes the responsibility of education and safety — most certainly when it relates to what we value most, our children. I can’t imagine anyone who disagrees with that.”

“Through a personal connection, I saw first-hand how the Sandy Hook tragedy affected families and I felt their pain. The concert is meant to do something good for a community that is recovering.”

Though since buoyed by support from people who knew what the organization is about, McGraw took plenty of flak from opponents who didn’t, and couldn’t be bothered to research it.

But it was all too much for Billy Currington, who was also supposed to be at the concert.

He headed for cover.

currington

That didn’t sit well with Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was killed in the slaughter.

“One of the best ways to stop gun violence is to stop talking about just the gun,” Hockley said.

Fat chance.