Catherine McNicol Stock: Show Them That North Dakota is Not 'Nut Country'

Stock, granddaughter of the late Harold Finch Sr. of the Nash-Finch Co., is the Kohn Professor of History at Connecticut College.

NEW LONDON, Conn. — As an Easterner with family ties to Grand Forks, I’m getting pretty tired of hearing about all the supposedly unthinking and uncompromising people in North Dakota.

In the week after Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., spoke on ABC and suggested that proposed gun reforms might be too “extreme,” liberal pundits called Red State gun owners everything from “gullible” to “crazy” to “stoolies for the National Rifle Association.”

On Jan. 11, to open his 5 p.m. show on pro-gun extremists, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews quoted JFK as he traveled toward Dallas in November 1963: “We’re headed for nut country.”

North Dakotans never have been unthinking or uncompromising, and they do not deserve to be perceived as such today. In fact, there may be no better time to show the nation that North Dakota is anything but “nut country.”...