News-Record.com

One of our readers wants us to fire Ed Hardin. Well, scratch that. As many years as Ed has been writing a sports column, I'd wager that there are more than one. Let me start over.

We published a letter from Amy Mannix today that trashed Ed Hardin for his story Sunday about hunting. And it took some shots at hunters, too: Society now knows that the relatively few die-hards clinging to their weapons like babies to their blankies are over-compensating, personifying the statement of psychiatrist Maurice Linden that "these men become over-attached to these guns, which become the external embodiment of the vigor and masculine aggressiveness they lack in themselves."

Phew. I know some hunters pretty well, and Dr. Linden's description doesn't fit with my sense of them. But what do I know? I'm no shrink.

She ends her letter saying that if Ed won't stop writing about hunting, we should "ditch him." We're not going to do that. We have readers who hunt. I think we have a lot of readers who hunt, actually. Writing about topics like this, particularly with the sort of perspective Ed did on Sunday, is part of what columnists do. Deciding that stories about hunting -- a legal and regulated activity -- should be banned from our pages because it "is a dying blood sport" isn't what newspapers do.

For the record, we did hear from others with the same opinion Ms. Mannix had. And we also heard from some who wanted more coverage on the front page on the Panthers, the Bobcats game, the upsets of LSU and Cal, and the baseball playoffs. (In addition to Ed's column, the page features the Carolina-South Carolina game, the Lowe's NASCAR race, and a scoreboard that included the Bobcats game, the LSU game, the Cal game and the A&T game.)

Sports readers are the most intensely passionate readers of any paper.

More thoughts at Greensboro Sports. (Guys, we're encouraging Ed to write about topics that aren't discussed to death on talk radio and ESPN.)