Who was rude at gun forum? Watch the video

This will be, no doubt, Must-See Community TV.

I'm referring, of course, to the videotape of a community forum earlier this week called to, depending on your viewpoint, stamp out gun violence or stamp out the Second Amendment.

Organizers of the meeting, saying they were under siege by a hostile pro-gun crowd, made sure police were on hand and made a last-minute decision to ban public comment at the meeting. That decision, gun-rights supporters said, was clearly a ploy to stifle their voices - an attempt to stamp out the First Amendment, if you will.

A crowd of almost 200 people, most of them gun owners' rights advocates, turned out for the session at Wheaton City Hall. It was sponsored for Wheaton North High School students by the League of Women Voters and the Illinois Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. As promised, attendees were not allowed to comment on the proceedings. But that didn't stop some from making catcalls and applauding derisively, and at one point someone heckled the main speaker, a Virginia Tech student who had been shot and wounded by a campus assassin two years ago. "Some," I think, is the operative word here. In the post-meeting blogging and Web posting, I've heard the audience described as relatively silent and the moderator as "rude and dismissive." Others have described the crowd as anything but that, almost threatening.

I can't say for sure; I wasn't there. The videotape of the meeting, we're told, is intended to be played on some community television stations. That should be instructive. I predict, though, some people will watch the precise same thing and form two entirely different opinions on the tone, tenor and agenda of the meeting.

One thing I learned a long time ago, almost 30 years in fact, when I was a reporter here is that very little inflames quite as much passion as gun-control debate. In the early 1980s it was in vogue for communities to consider a local ban on handguns. Suburban Morton Grove, in fact, was the first in the nation to pass such an ordinance. Several other towns debated the issue, and most rejected a local gun-control law. I covered a public hearing in Arlington Heights on a handgun ban. It was a boisterous meeting, with, I'd have to say, a fair amount of catcalls and heckling by the pro-gun people. I was the guy assigned to do the "color" story, so I stood right in the middle of the crowd, never felt threatened. On the other hand, I didn't announce I was a member of the left-leaning media; perhaps that would have changed things.

The tempest set off by this week's gun forum shared a few similarities with a meeting that didn't happen just a week earlier: the intended visit to Naperville North High School of former Weather Underground member William Ayers. In that case, too, some felt their interests were being trampled by a left-leaning school system and let their protests be heard. They succeeded in getting the meeting canceled, which resulted in others decrying the idea that a smaller but very vocal faction had trampled the rights of people to hear what Ayers might have to say.

Personally, I think it's too bad the Ayers appearance was canceled. Those who don't care for the guy might have attended a likewise-canceled session the same day at Anderson's Bookshop, asked some tough questions and held his feet to the fire. Similarly, I think it's too bad there's so much fear - justified or not - that organizers of the gun meeting felt compelled to shut off public debate. Meanwhile, the videotape might provide a measure of insight on the tone and tenor of the meeting, who was rude and dismissive.

Either way, it's been quite an education for our high-schoolers the past couple of weeks, hasn't it?