On December 5 the New York Times published a front page editorial calling for broad and immediate nation-wide gun control. Not since 1920 had the Times published a front page editorial. In 1920 they railed against the dangers that the presidential candidacy of Warren Harding supposedly presented for the nation. Harding was elected president, anyway.
Last week's editorial was prompted by the horrific one-two punch of the recent murders at a Colorado Planned Parenthood facility and at a San Bernardino, California office complex. The problem with the Times editorial is that it casts a clumsy verbal net over the Second Amendment in its call for gun control. And it does so by assuming a fixable linkage exists between incidents as wide ranging as terrorism, street crime, and mental illness. The presumed linkage: guns. The Times' solution: gun control.
The New York Times - and their ilk - would have us believe that "guns caused these deaths so if we get rid of guns the risk of similar future deaths will disappear." And they want to edit, rewrite, or eviscerate the Second Amendment to achieve their goal of gun control.
The Colorado shooting, the San Bernadino shooting, the shootings on college campuses, the shocking daily murders in Chicago street gang warfare are mirrored through gunfire, but each is elementally rooted in strikingly different circumstances. Mental illness, Islamic terrorism, and raging inner city gang warfare cannot be addressed, much less solved, with a one size fits all solution of "ban guns and crimes committed with guns will go away." It won't work. Because even if the guns go away the criminal, the terrorist, the mentally ill, and the sociopathic gang member remains in place.
Because there are evil, troubled, and sociopathic individuals walking among us the New York Times school of gun control would choose to stop law abiding Americans who own guns (for hunting, target shooting, protection, collecting) from accessing their Second Amendment rights. The Times argument doesn't hold water and its dramatic presentation on the newspaper's front page fails to increase its credibility.
Not everyone obeys the law and not everyone respects the rights of others to live peaceably. This is the sad truth of mankind throughout the ages and it's more true today than ever before: The world is a very dangerous place. And it isn't made safer by disarming the law abiding and making them a better target for those who - for whatever sickening reason - choose to commit murder and mayhem.