For the first time since 1920, The New York Times has published a front-page editorial. The piece, entitled “End the Gun Epidemic in America” online and “The Gun Epidemic” in print, echoes the moral outrage reverberating throughout America and forcefully calls for strict gun control laws.
It reads, in part:
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.
That last line, for me, is the most forceful. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation. This is certainly true for First Amendment protections — while Americans are granted freedom of speech, of religion, and of the press, all have had reasonable restrictions placed upon them. One cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater, commit a crime because of a religious belief, or publish libelous remarks.
Such reasonable restrictions would have long ago been placed upon Second Amendment rights, were it not for the astronomical sums spent every year by the NRA to ensure that gun ownership is the only right granted Americans in the Constitution that escapes reasonable regulation.
The national outrage over the continued mass shootings in this country is finally spilling, dramatically, into the mainstream press. Just yesterday, the New York Daily News on its front page called Wayne Lapierre a “terrorist” and accused the NRA of enabling a “sick gun jihad against America.” The New York Times has followed that with its first front-page editorial in nearly 100 years.
If more outlets follow, if the press fulfills its mandate by sparking a real, sustained national conversation on gun control despite opposition from those with money and those with power, we may have a chance to end this “national disgrace.”
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, recently published by Oneworld Publications.
Follow on Twitter @David_ehg