The reporter asked me if this made me "less inclined to trust Dave Kopel as a source".
I replied:
No, what it does is reaffirm to me that we are all human and are all capable of being sucker-punched--even the most highly respected among us, and especially if the information is calculated and comes to us from a seemingly credible source.
Who would even think of making up a story like that? And why?
That said, I would not have gone with it just on Kopel's say-so and without further corroboration--his reputation and credibility were what made me willing to invest the time to drop everything and investigate. Everything that happened after that is on me. I took the email he sent me and called Schreiner, who corroborated it. Then I called Korrine, who did likewise, and even went the added step of checking her out and finding her online resume. I also called Adams County Sheriff's PIO, but it was a Sunday so I left a voice mail. Finding the Fox report which also fit in with the information I'd been given seemed to be the clincher.
I can look back in hindsight and think of questions I could have asked that might have given me pause, but this whole thing is just so bizarre, the concocted story is so elaborate, and the person behind it is just so ... unique ... that it falls outside the scope of normal human experience.
I "fell" for it for all the reasons listed. Kopel passed it on because he got it from a respected activist and NRA director who had been asked by show management to get to the bottom of the floor buzz. Schreiner in turn got it from a person representing herself as an attorney who was brought to the show by a respected and long-standing collector, so there was an assumption of credibility that I believe is something decent people afford each other unless they have reason to suspect otherwise.
1 comment:
Well said. Interesting proportion re the collectivists lies swallowed by many w/o question. You have defined question authority well David.
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