New York Times: Regulate Guns Like Toys
This week The New York Times offered an op-ed piece that suggested that guns should be regulated like toys. Seriously? We don’t recall there being a 1934 Federal Toy Act, or the Toy Control Act of 1968, and yet Nicholas D. Kristof suggests:
“To protect the public, we regulate cars and toys, medicines and mutual funds. So, simply as a public health matter, shouldn’t we take steps to reduce the toll from our domestic arms industry?”
Kristof offers some ways that this can be done, and we’ll respond one at a time:
“Limit gun purchases to one per month per person, to reduce gun trafficking. And just as the government has cracked down on retailers who sell cigarettes to minors, get tough on gun dealers who sell to traffickers.”
How does one per month really matter? The truth is that very few people buy more than one gun a month anyway. And there are those times when stores run specials, offer deals, etc. There are also times when someone might sell a collection or when a relative has passed away. Does this mean that as a collector I couldn’t buy my friends collection of antique pistols because of some waiting period?
“Push for more gun safes, and make serial numbers harder to erase.”
OK, good advice. Tell the criminals they need gun safes. Likewise, stolen and black market gun owners don’t care about serial numbers.
“Improve background checks and follow Canada in requiring a 28-day waiting period to buy a handgun. And ban oversize magazines, such as the 33-bullet magazine allegedly used in Tucson. If the shooter had had to reload after firing 10 bullets, he might have been tackled earlier. And invest in new technologies such as ‘smart guns,’ which can be fired only when near a separate wristband or after a fingerprint scan.”
The magazine wasn’t 33-bullets. Maybe reporters should do better fact checking. Likewise, what if the shooter decided that one gun wasn’t enough. What if he brought several guns instead? We can play that silly game all day.
As for the smart guns, that doesn’t do anything to the millions of guns in private hands – unless of course someone suggests those be turned in and destroyed? Likewise, who is going to pay for this “investment” in new technologies? Consumers don’t want it, and therefore the makers won’t pay for it.
The waiting period sounds good, but criminals don’t wait. And in the case of the shooter in Tucson, he bought the gun months ago anyway, so the point is somewhat moot.
In other words, there is safety in guns. The problem is calling on these measures only hurts the law abiding, not the criminal.
Firing Back: NRA Wants Child To Kill Each Other
Does the headline above make any sense? It does if you believe the liberal media hype that is being spewed in editorials such as the one for Scripps Howard News Service in an editorial written by Dan K. Thomasson. In response to the National Rifle Association’s attempts to overturn a Texas law that restricts the carrying of a concealed weapon to those 21-years or older, he writes:
“If the NRA has its way, that area of violence in our urban sprawl will get much larger with innocent children the victims of gang and individual crime.”
Thomasson also notes incidents of gang related crimes in Washington, D.C. Last time we checked Washington, D.C. was thousands of miles from Texas. So why does an incident where teenage gang members – who had guns illegally – attacked other teens should have any bearing on the law in Texas? Read more
Las Vegas Review-Journal Responds to NY Times Editorial
A new firearms debate is brewing, and it is in regard to how old one should be to own a gun. The New York Times had suggested that the Second Amendment should not “allow armed teenagers in their communities.” The Las Vegas Review-Journal responded, noting, “hasn’t this country long allowed those as young as 17 to enlist in the armed forces and fight – with real guns?”
Good point, and kudos to the Review-Journal for addressing this point.
Firing Back: NY Times Cites WaPo
Isn’t The New York Times anti-gun enough already? Apparently not, as the Old Gray Lady’s editors referenced a recent Washington Post anti-gun editorial. But the NY Times is also showing a bit of sour grapes as well, offering this editorial the weekend before election day, knowing that the new congress will likely be even friendlier to the Second Amendment supporters.
In it, the editors offer this thought:
“As a new Congress looms, we suggest lawmakers travel to Washington by way of West Virginia and an obscure federal building called the National Tracing Center. There they can see workers laboring through unmanageably high backlogs of handwritten paper records submitted by the nation’s gun dealers. This is Congress’s handiwork — at the behest of the gun lobby and to the detriment of public safety.”
What this editorial doesn’t say is that there are more guns in private hands and yet less crime. But this editorial is notable for what it doesn’t say. It never draws attention to the fact that the gun lobby is powerful because it speaks for the people on election day, in other words this is what people west of the Hudson River really want.
As we’ve noted previously, too often editors at the Times and WaPo seem to think that from the extreme east coast they tell what they believe is right for the country, but never see the country. They don’t see the hunters, they don’t see the collectors and they don’t see the gun shows. They don’t see these things because their respective cities, New York City and Washington, D.C., have had such harsh gun laws that private citizens were all but stripped of their Second Amendment rights, and thus the gun lobby has ensured as goes New York and D.C. so won’t go the rest of the country.
NY Times Editorial Praises Mayors’ Report
In an editorial titled “Lax and Lethal,” The New York Times praises Mayors Against Illegal Guns, writing:
“The high price Americans pay for weak gun laws — no matter where they live — is made painfully clear in a new study prepared by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a bipartisan coalition led by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston.”
The paper later concludes:
“There are 12,000 gun murders a year in this country, many committed with guns flowing into states with the strongest gun laws from parts of the country with the weakest ones. Stanching that flow — with tough national and state laws — is a matter of life or death.” Read more
Chicago Didn’t Enforce Gun Laws Reports New York Times
Irony in the Windy City indeed. We’ve been continuing to report that Chicago had had for years one of the strictest gun laws on the books in the country and yet has seen a wave of gun violence. Mayor Richard Daley, among others, pointed the blame at guns.
The Supreme Court overturned the city’s gun ban earlier this year, a move that Daley has been trying to find a way of fighting at all costs. But in another example of true irony, it is being reported by The New York Times that the gun ban in Chicago wasn’t all that well enforced. Read more
NY Times Editorial Calls for Stronger Gun Bans
The Old Gray Lady shows all the understanding of gun control as a real old lady who has never held a gun. The New York Times responded to the SCOTUS ruling with yet another editorial, calling for more gun laws, and this time wrapping it up with the ending:
“Cities and states should counter with tough but sensible laws designed to resist legal challenges and keep gun possession to a minimum.”
What exactly does keeping gun possession to a minimum accomplish we counter? Does it actually keep guns off the street? This is the rallying cry time and time again, but the truth is that criminals don’t find ways to come up legal challenges, criminals don’t bother applying for permits, criminals buy illegal guns and they ignore the laws. Meanwhile law-abiding citizens, including hunters, collectors and those who need guns for personal safety in the crime-ridden neighborhoods, are left unable to legally own these items.
So why is a ban, or a limit sensible? Should people be limited to the number of cars they can own? What’s next, limiting the amount of soda you drink or the amount of salt on your fries – but wait, New York City is actually trying to pass those limits. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the ultimate nanny state thinks guns should be kept out of everyone’s hands too. If only this included the criminals.
New York Times Editorial Off Base on What is Reasonable
Clearly some of the more liberal minded in the media think “reasonable” is being unable to own a gun in one’s home for self-defense. The New York Times editorial proves that point:
“After serious setbacks to sensible gun control, the top court in Massachusetts on Wednesday made it clear that the Second Amendment does not bar states from protecting children and others against the risk posed by unsecured guns in the home.”
Yes, “others” are protected, but those “others” could include those who break into your house to inflict harm on you! How can you have a gun for self-defense if you have to keep it secured? While we agree it is a good idea to keep a gun secured when there are children around, what about those with no kids and who have had their homes broken into in the past? Are they more secure, or are those “others” just safer during a home invasion?
NY Times News Story Offers Opinion – Anti-Gun Opinion at That
In a piece looking at both sides of the “open carry” debate that is raging around the country, The New York Times threw in just a tad about of anti-gun rhetoric:
“Newer, more driven by grass-roots and the Internet than the N.R.A., open-carry groups are also less centralized, less predictable and often more confrontational in their push for gun rights.”
The author goes on to suggest to the reader the dangers of such a move:
“Gun control advocates have raised particular concerns about open-carry laws because under these laws in many states, gun owners are not required to have a permit or any sort of training or testing.”
What is the point of stressing the issue of permits for example? On the one hand the new groups are described as “less predictable” and “confrontational,” wording that could imply these to be “dangerous” to some New York readers. Likewise, it is practically implied that it would create a wild west situation without any permits where novices carry guns. This news piece reads like an editorial at times, but should we expect anything less from the “old gray lady?”
Vanity Fair Offers Unfair Look at Gun Laws
You know you’re off to a bad story when the writer of a story for Vanity Fair looks to The New York Times as a source. And while Bill Bradley meant for his Politics and Power piece titled “Gun Rights, a Crib Sheet” to be humorous, I don’t think most law-abiding gun owners will be laughing.
Here is an example of what passes for liberal mainstream media humor:
“This month, the Virginia House repealed the one-gun-per-month law (passed in 1993 by Virginia’s then Democratic Governor, L. Douglas Wilder), which limited residents to one handgun purchase every 30 days. Underlying Message: If the rest of the country (except Maryland, New Jersey, and California) can buy more than 12 guns a year, why can’t we? What it Means For You: More crazy people with more guns.”
This is insulting to say the least.
