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NYT Front-page Editorial: “End the Gun Epidemic in America”
For the first time since 1920, the New York Times has posted an editorial on its front page. Back then, it was to inveigh against the presidential nomination of Warren G. Harding to replace Woodrow Wilson. (Harding went on to win the general election with more than 60 percent of the popular vote.)
This time, the Gray Lady inveighs against guns. We reprint it here in full and ask Ricochet members to respond to it.
All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.
But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.
It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.
Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.
But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically — eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.
It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.
Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.
What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?
Have at it, Ricochetti.
Published in Guns
it would require Americans who own (___________) to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.
The progressive template. Infinitely applicable.
And if they don’t do it, well, that’s why there’s boxcars lined up on the east-bound railway tracks.
My concern is that this will embolden the Kwisatz Haderach in the White House to go big with an executive order on gun control.
He wants to be “transformative”, and he’s said that gun control will be his #1 priority in his last year in office. This could be… bad.
I’m clapping for this comment at my desk.
Gun-free zones (as was the site of the SB Massacre) are nothing but government-created hunting preserves for mass murderers. John Lott has written extensively on how practically all massacres in the past 50 years have been in “gun-free” zones.
California’s gun laws worked perfectly — for the murderers. The Dems running California would rather feel good about themselves then let John Q. Public have a (loaded) pistol on his hip with which to protect himself against the next maniac on a killing spree or the next Mohammed Skyhook on jihad.
Yes, this is the precise equivalent on our side isn’t it? No shortage of wrong answers on either side.
Amen.
It would do more to limit mass murder than banning guns.
Battle of the bans.
Here’s hoping this dreck has the same impact as in 1920; the country bursts out laughing & goes hard the other way. Sometimes I really wonder if some people in this country are living in an inverse version of reality…
Well, that’s going to be awkward when their side tries to fight it without guns.
Did anyone else notice the thinly veiled reference “…at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency”? They really are trying to turn their political opposition into Joseph McCarthy.
The arrogance is breathtaking.
I’d like to thank the Times for so swiftly acknowledging the thesis of my earlier post.
When faced with a spike in mass shootings that its own analysis shows coinciding with the inauguration of President Obama, the Times concludes that the root cause is an American tradition of armed self defense dating back over three centuries.
An understanding of causality is evidently not required of today’s journalism majors.
The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.
Should have read: “whose job it is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on a warmed-over failed ideology and political power they aim to strengthen by disarming an ever-disillusioned citizenry.”
That editorial looks like it was written by a high-school student. It could hardly be more childish and embarrassing. Yet I can all too easily picture them patting themselves on the back all the way to the trendy bar they repair to after work. And oh, the drama of making it the front page. Oooooh!
It’s even worse than you think. The people we are depending on to save us from his tyranny are . . . Congress! :(
Sad but true. Sadder is this is just the recycled argument they make for affirmative action, Head Start, sentencing reform, national conversation on “anything” (typically one thing), minimum wage, negotition with [Iran, North Korea …].
Better news: San Diego Union-Tribune readers poll is nearing 6500 votes on a federal assault weapons ban. 77% NO.
You can say that again.
Normally, I would say “Eh, don’t be so sure” at statements like this. But then again, one of the things that is so very valuable to the pro-2A community is the fact that their political opposition is so rabidly, near-violently, opposed to them. It always helps to be on your guard.
So let’s get this straight: Restricting the admission of potential terrorists into our communities is, according to President Obama, “not who we are as Americans,” while the occasion of an immigrant jihadist’s act of war on behalf of a foreign state, targeting unarmed civilians in a gun-free zone, is the trigger for a once-a-century front page diatribe against the most quintessentially American civil right.
Perhaps the editors of the Times feel emboldened by the fact that Senator Paul’s amendment to “pause” new arrivals from 30 Muslim countries with significant terrorist movements failed in the Senate 89-10. Tellingly, the vote was taken after the San Bernardino massacre.
So now it is the definition of Americanism to admit Tashfeen Malik into the United States, following a guaranteed-accurate background check, of course. And when she elects to slaughter her neighbors, our elite journalists rush to the barricades to disarm her victims.
As Abraham Lincoln noted, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.”
it is kind of funny reasoning, though. If you could simply ask would-be murderers to give up their guns for the good of the country and expect them to comply, you could, perhaps, simply ask them to not murder anyone for the good of the country.
Oh, you mean confiscate guns. Like, at gunpoint, I suppose… got it.
of course, to those who think this could never realistically happen, I really can envision a scenario where the manufacture and sale of ammunition is outlawed. I think it is realistic for the government to severely limit our 2a rights, especially if they’re patient.
One final thought before lights-out: Why is none of this ever President Obama’s fault?
ISIS, the President’s jayvee team, is on a roll, its success evidence to at least some Muslims that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s call to jihad carries a divine blessing. But when ISIS terrorists launch a successful attack on U.S. soil, the President’s policies are never questioned in the slightest. Instead, it is American freedoms that take the blame.
Rather than keeping the bad guys out and our freedoms sacrosanct, the Left insists on wide open borders and an authoritarian response to the attendant chaos.
“yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.”
Ah, I think I see the problem here. Let me help the NY Times: Criminals and terrorists don’t care about their fellow citizens.
Please please end this front-page epidemic!
The NRA is getting another donation from me.
If only we had restrictive gun laws like they do in Paris. Then we wouldn’t have stray acts of indeterminate mass violence.
Also, why isn’t this “letting the terrorists win”? They’ll have changed our way of life. Plus the added benefit it will make things easier for them in the long run. Is the NYT saying we should just surrender now?
Nice McCarthy dog-whistle.
Yup. Jumped out at me.
Exactly. Well said. Example: It would require Americans (or whoever) who own the pages of the New York Times to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.
I didn’t make it past the first sentence of the second paragraph.
“Motives do not matter.”
Motives do not matter?
At the risk of violating the CoC, motives do not f***ing matter?
This sums up the insanity, the irrationality, the utter stupidity of the anti-gun crowd. It is moral equivalence at its most depraved and infuriating extremity. Here the Times explicitly blames the mechanism, the means of violence, and thereby excuses the motivation. They grant a pardon, complete forgiveness, to the extremist killers, and blame instead the inert tools.
I knew that they believed this. I am honestly shocked that they admitted it so openly.