The New York Times Editorial Board has a proven track record of publishing , caterwauling, garment-rending screeds when it comes to guns, and they did it yet again. I took the time to read it so you can avoid taking ibuprofen. Here’s the worst of it:
A year ago, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted a Christmas photo on Twitter. In it, Mr. Massie, his wife and five children pose in front of their ornament-bedecked tree. Each person is wearing a big grin and holding an assault weapon. “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” Mr. Massie wrote on Twitter.
The photo was posted on Dec. 4, just four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Mich., that left four students dead and seven other people injured.
No matter how hard the Second Amendment community tries to educate them, the journalism community is incorrigible and chooses to use scary jargon over accurate language. We’ve been over so many times; “assault weapon” is a totally made-up phrase. It’s most accurate definition comes from Cam Edwards, who defines it as, “the next gun I want to ban.”
Posting a photo with your guns after a mass shooting is not inappropriate. One is a celebration of freedom, the other is an abuse of it. Would the NYT Editorial Board complain if a Muslim lawmaker posted a photo of himself performing Namaz the day after an Islamic terror attack, and demand that he practice his religion in the closet?
These weapons, lightweight and endlessly customizable, aren’t often used in the way their devotees imagine — to defend themselves and their families. (In a recent comprehensive survey, only 13 percent of all defensive use of guns involved any type of rifle.) Nevertheless, in the 18 years since the end of the federal assault weapons ban, the country has been flooded with an estimated 25 million AR-15-style semiautomatic rifles, making them one of the most popular in the United States.
There’s a flipside the NYT is hiding when complaining about the low rate of Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) using rifles of any kind, and that is the low rate of attacks involving rifles of any kind. FBI statistics have borne that out, year after year.
The AR-15 has also become a potent talisman for right-wing politicians and many of their voters. That’s a particularly disturbing trend at a time when violent political rhetoric and actual political violence in the United States are rising.
The reason the AR-15 has, in the partisan words of the NYT, become “a potent talisman,” is because left-wing politicians and voters have openly called for banning it. During the 2020 presidential debates, Texas’ favorite LatinX politician Beto O’Rourke, openly called for gun confiscation on the debate stage. Tellingly, the other presidential candidates on the debate stage stayed mum and didn’t protest it. The Democrat audience watching the debate cheered wildly when Beto proposed gun confiscation.
Is it any surprise that when one half of the political class openly says they will disarm you, the other half vies for your votes by saying they won’t?
This board has argued for stronger enforcement of state anti-militia laws, better tracking of extremists in law enforcement and the military, and stronger international cooperation to tackle it as a transnational issue.
The NYT Editorial Board, driven by its hatred of the Bill of Rights, is calling for violations of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. It also calls for conspiring with foreign countries to subvert the U.S. Constitution. The level of recklessness here is unbelievable.
The op-ed proceeds to falsely equate right-wing views with extremism; that will require a separate write-up to debunk it, but there are other points that need to be addressed:
Understanding how these currents feed one another is crucial to understanding and reversing political violence and right-wing extremism.
Notably missing from the article is a single reference to “left-wing.” It’s as if James T. Hodgkinson was a Shakespearean work of fiction. Nor is there any reference to the 2020 riots, which is euphemistically swept under the rug as “racial justice rallies.”
The writers then proceed to inflate the revenues of the firearms industry, which dwarfs those of other industries, by expanding the sales period to an entire decade:
The American gun industry has reaped an estimated $1 billion in sales over the past decade from AR-15-style guns…
It’s a well-known fact that Gun Grab Lobby uses suicides to inflate violence statistics, but now the NYT Editorial Board is using lobbying numbers going all the way back to 1989!
“From 1989 to 2022, gun rights groups contributed $50.5 million to federal candidates and party committees,” the group found. “Of that, 99 percent of direct contributions went to Republicans.”
They don’t mention anything about the billionaire bankrolling of gun control.
After pitching more unconstitutional proposals like banning gun sales to 18-to-21 year old adults, repealing the PLCAA, mandatory “gun-liability” insurance, limiting the First Amendment rights of firearms manufacturers, thankfully, the NYT Editorial Board ends on a realistic note:
Calls for confiscating them — or even calls for another assault weapons ban — are well intentioned and completely unrealistic.
I can drink to that!