by Linoge at Walls of the City has done yeoman’s work in compiling the record of plagiarism, theft, copyright violations, and outright lies perpetrated in the name of gun blogging by Robert Farago and his minions at Tthe Truth About Guns. This post was a long time in the making and probably overdue. As Linoge notes, he was assisted in his efforts by a number of other pro-rights bloggers and I’m happy to say I was one of them.
What brought this to a head and resulted in the Linoge’s “uber-post” were two events that happened at the Gun Rights Policy Conference. The first was the awarding of a SAF Defender of Liberty award (one of many) to Farago. When the Second Amendment Foundation made the award they were unaware of Farago’s duplicitous past of plagiarism, copyright violations, and lies. An uber-post like that of Linoge – and the linking of it by other reputable gun bloggers – will help prevent this sort of error in the future.
The second, and much more serious, event was the treatment of Washington Times senior editor Emily Miller by Farago. Not only did he ambush her in the hallway in a creepy manner but his subsequent posts were beyond the pale. From Emily’s comments on the encounter which she posted at Shall Not Be Questioned:
Thank you so much for this post. I felt ambushed by that guy. He was
very creepy and jumpy, which made me nervous. I should have trusted my
instincts, but instead stayed and answered all his questions politely. I
don’t know why he feels the need to repeatedly attack me for being a
girl and for not having extensive training in the six months I’ve owned a
gun. That’s all true, but I’ve also gotten the gun laws changed in D.C.
to make it easier to get a legal gun, so the haters don’t affect my
work!
If you do read Linoge’s post – and you should – you will see a report of an incident at the 2011 NRA Annual Meeting involving similar rude and condescending behavior by Farago towards attorney Alan Gura. I was there, I witnessed it, and I was furious.
Alan Gura and Emily Miller have in their different ways done more for gun rights in the last five years than virtually anyone out there. We don’t need the National Enquirer of the gun blogosphere treating them like dirt. It is as simple as that. We can quibble about whether it matters if Farago is a plagiarist or not but rude, boorish, and condescending behavior towards good people doing great work should always be called out.
Well, strictly speaking, in general, Farago is not a plagiarist – in all but a few circumstances, he has at least noted the domain he stole something from, and in all cases, when called on the carpet for it, he did eventually end up identifying the source.
However, plagiarist and copyright infringer are two different animals, and Robert is very much the latter. His use of other peoples' works fall well outside the bounds of accepted "fair use", and citing his sources does not change that.
But, yeah, that is all in addition to him being a jackass, boor, and various other inappropriate things. As I probably said elsewhere, the sad thing is that this idiot has done so many reprehensible things, you would be hard-pressed to find something that did not piss you off (though people have managed to do so, much to my disappointment).
Thanks for the link!
It sounds like he's using the lifehacker.com model. How else could you post once an hour. It can't be all original content. It's about making money and not about protecting rights.
I really appreciate your support! -Emily