User talk:Dontmessaround

Bruce Stern Collection

Hi, and let me first of all apologize if I have made some errors in my research.

What I was trying to do, was provide the maximum information on Mr. Stern's life that I could scrape from what little sources I could find of him online. People in the online gun community have marveled over that collection for a long time and when I finally found out who it (supposedly) belonged to, I thought such a remarkable man deserved an entry on Wikipedia, and also that such an entry would give the collection more exposure.

In any case, if that collection didn't belong to the late Mr. Stern, who DID it belong to? Do you have any idea? I am going to go ahead and trust that you are who you say you are. I take it that you are basically trying to remove from my article the attribution of the fabled gun vault to Mr. Stern, but that you can't just come in and say "Actually, this vault did NOT belong to Bruce Stern" because you can't just do that on Wikipedia, you need to have evidence and a citation. So you have returned and said that there was an "interview" with a family member that revealed this fact. Whether or not this is actually true, you are attempting to use it as evidence or some kind of citation to back up your claims, which I can't fault you for because if you are truly a relative of Stern's, you're going to have to just ask that people trust you and take you at your word - if there was no external source verifying your claims.

In any case, I think you are probably more qualified to write this article than I am, because you are actually a family member of the late Mr. Stern. (By the way - my condolences for your loss...I am sure that he was a great man and meant no disrespect by writing this article, I just wanted the rest of the world to know who he was.) But the problem is, even if you know more about this man than anyone else in the world, you can't write a Wikipedia article on someone without external citations.

I admit my citations came from unstable sources. But I thought they were better than nothing at all.

In any case, you should edit the section about the gun collection attributed to him, and make it more clear that it was not actually his, if this is indeed true. You should also contact the Snopes website and tell them that they are wrong in attributing the collection to Stern.

Finally, you asked why I mentioned that he was Jewish. (I assume that he was, in fact, Jewish, as he was buried by a Jewish funeral home.) The reason is because, with all the anti-Semitism in the world, and all the people who are bigoted against the Jews, it would be good to have people know that a man like Mr. Stern, who heroically served his country both overseas and at home with his efforts to ensure our constitutional liberties, was Jewish. If men like Mr. Stern were the ambassadors of the Jewish people to the American public, and not the far-left Jews in Hollywood and in the political world who are doing everything they can to undermine our rights as American citizens to bear arms, the world would be a better place.

If Mr. Stern was not a practicing Jew or if he wanted his faith to be a private matter, then I respect your decision to remove it from my article.