Talk:The Great Equalizer

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The NewsMax reference forming the foundation of this article, and the phrase _The Great Equalizer_, appears to fail the attribution test of WP:ATT, and fails the reliable sources test of WP:RS, and appears to be in violation of WP:NOT#SOAP, being based upon a personal blog of Miguel A. Faria. I suggest that this article be deleted. The citation of the Joel Miller commentary also fails a WP:NOT#SOAP test and the [[WP:ATT] test. SaltyBoatr 23:46, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

The phrase is undoubtedly well documented, if that's your concern (rather than simply doing the bidding of the gun prohibitionists). Try checking books.google.com. 6 Apr 2007 M-K.

I ask you to assume good faith for my actions, and I view your assertion 'simply doing the bidding of gun prohibitionists' as a personal attack. I have given my reasoning based on Wikipedia policies. Also, I have checked books.google.com and find that the 'firearm' use of _The Great Equalizer_ is in the vast minority of uses of the phrase, not occurring until the twentieth entry. I have checked and found that the phrase in the article is not 'undoubtedly well documented'. Per WP:ATT, good attribution is from academics, journalists, and other researchers, and the papers and books they produce. The attribution in the article is not that, but rather from seemingly fringe extremists and their blogs and websites. SaltyBoatr 18:14, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Salty, I've read some of your other comments regarding the Second Amendment article. They speak for themselves. As do the numerous citations found thru Google books, if not elsewhere. 4-06-07 M-K

Indeed, it's ridiculous to claim that a phrase as famous and long-lived as this one should not be included. And it seems quite likely that, were it about about cabbage, he wouldn't have nominated it. Hell, even the TV show The Equalizer had, as the origin of its name, this phrase. What's more, it would be a valid entry even if it only regarded the application of the phrase to the Colt revolver, which is one of the most famous weapons in history.

Claiming that NOT#SOAP is relevant is ridiculous, too. It is certainly a title that is primarily used by one side of an argument, but so is the phrase "make love, not war".

It also seems to me that you cherry picked your claim of books.google as a reason to delete it.

• First, if other uses of the phrase are also common, it simply means they should be added to the article, not the whole thing deleted.

• Second, how curious that you didn't include a google count, in general. Any potentially article-worthy concept that has 292,000 hits is clearly worthy, even if they had all turned out to be personal blogs or something. If a half million bloggers signed off their posts with "Yoggles!", but one could not find a single professional, formal reference to the word, it would still be worthy of an entry.

• Third, the phrase "the great equalizer" plus the word "handgun" produces 37,900 results, most of which appear to refer to the handgun usage, specifically. In fact, if you look up "the great equalizer" plus "internet", or plus "nukes", two common spinoffs of the Great Equalizer concept, even many of those make reference to handguns, or guns in general, or colt revolvers specifically, as being the origin of the phrase, or with the "nukes" or "internet" being an incidental hit.

• People who want to DELETE information, rather than fix it (as with your not adding the other, spinoff definitions you claim to be the majority in books.google, but instead wanting to delete the whole article) usually have censorship as their primary goal. The guy who just deletes all mention of Bush's alcohol abuse from his article because "it was not properly referenced" or "it was in the wrong place", instead of moving it or adding a ^{[citation needed]} tag usually turns out to have an edit history chock-full of neocon/RiNO advocacy. If he's trying to delete references to Clinton's sexual assault accusations instead of fixing them, on the other hand, his edit history is probably full of Liberalism. If he's trying to delete both, then lo and behold it turns out he has some special edit trend that shows embarassment of recent presidents undesirable to him, in general.

A good editor, whenever possible, does not delete; he fixes. --Kaz 13:55, 8 April 2007 (UTC)