By Hal Brown
You can read the replies to the tweet from the Murdoch owned New York Post by clicking below. Most of them are either pro-gun or anti-Biden. This is not surprising since, after all, this is The New York Post’s Twitter page.
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Here’s a link to their editorial.
This isn’t the first time that The NY Post has taken a stand for gun control. They published this 2019 cover in today’s editorial:
This is what Rolling Stone wrote about their 2019 editorial.
In the Post‘s blunt editorial, the paper reasons that Trump is “positioned to assuage” America’s national fear of mass shootings. “On gun control, you are a pragmatic centrist, someone who knows there is a vast majority of Americans who are not to the extreme left or right on this issue,” the newspaper writes. “They just want the killings to stop.”
The piece acknowledges that Trump “regularly praises the Second Amendment and received the National Rifle Association’s support” in the 2016 presidential election. But it argues that the president should “appeal now” to the majority of gun-owners who use weapons for hunting or self-defense and are “appalled by the endless string of mass shootings.”
“An assault weapons ban is aimed at the likes of the El Paso shooter, who coldly plotted how to kill as many as possible, as quickly as possible,” the editorial reads. “Let’s make that a lot tougher for the next monster.”
The New York Post‘s stance is noteworthy given that Murdoch is a noted Trump supporter (and, reportedly, unofficial adviser) and that the president frequently praises and cites the Fox News Channel, which Murdoch also owns. And it’s not the paper’s first direct plea to Trump following a gun-related massacre: In February 2018, after the Parkland, Florida shooting, a Post cover read, “Mr. President, please act. We need sensible gun control to help stop the slaughter.”
Lotta good this did. Is there any hope that the most recent spree shootings will make any difference to the Senate Republicans who will need to vote for gun control legislation? Consider this from Ted Cruz and other GOP senators mount fiery defence of gun ownership in wake of Atlanta and Boulder shootings:
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee staged yet another defence of guns and gun owners at a hearing on Tuesday, falsely accusing their Democratic counterparts of trying to take away guns from “law-abiding citizens” in the wake of two mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder, Colorado, over the last week.
“Every time there is a shooting, we play this ridiculous theatre where this committee gets together and proposes a bunch of laws that would do nothing to stop these murders,” Senator Ted Cruz said at Tuesday’s hearing.
“What happens in this committee after every mass shooting is Democrats propose taking away guns from law-abiding citizens because that’s their political objective,” Mr Cruz said.
Oddly there’s one gun-worshipping Republican of Congress who showed a modicum of awareness that her view on guns might not play well with the general public. Wait for it….
… it’s none other than Lauren “Lock and Load” Boebert:
Lauren Boebert ridiculed for hiding her guns before Colorado shooting interview: 'What happened to the assault weapon shrine?
I was particularly struck by the photo in the story which seems to show two loaded clips in her assault rifles:
There has been speculation that gun control is the perfect “weapon” against the filibuster (read article from The Week here). Unfortunately gun control advocates hoped that mass shootings might lead to ending the filibuster before. This is from 2019 when in the aftermath of Sandy Hook Congress shot down a massively popular legislative push for universal background checks for anyone seeking to purchase an assault rifle: read “How Do We Ban Assault Weapons? Banish The Filibuster.” That article was amazingly prescient:
Now imagine what McConnell and Co. would do with the filibuster if Democrats win back the White House and Senate in 2020 and try to pass a gun control bill like New Zealand's. If the last decade is any evidence, the GOP will use the filibuster to squash every attempt to ratify new gun control laws. And since it’s extremely unlikely that the Democrats will hold the required 60 seats to override the filibuster, gun control supporters must face the tough political reality that we have to push the Democrats to get rid of the filibuster.
We’re the ones who read articles like “The NRA way of life is ruining our nation” by Andrea Marcotte and “Republicans have moved past the NRA: The GOP is now even more extreme on guns” by Heather “Digby” Parton, both in Salon a website I doubt many Republicans read.
Do you think there will be a single anti-gun control comment on this diary?
Republicans, whether in Congress, state legislatures, or out in the real world where the U.S. which has just 4% of the world’s population owns about 40% of civilian-owned guns globally, according to a 2018 report from the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. Read: “How many people in the United States own guns?”
Rational arguments for gun control won’t be taken seriously, let alone heard by the gun loving Republicans. It may be something of a stretch, but there I think there is a similar mindset among Republicans when it comes to attitudes about guns and their beliefs that the government was trying to tell them what to do, to take away their freedom, when it came to wearing masks to protect others from Covid. I call this the don’t tread on me syndrome. Consider all the photos of the Gladstone flag at Trump rallies including at the Jan. 6th insurrection:
Although no less a patriot than Benjamin Franklin used divided rattlesnake in an essay published 20 years from the American Revolution titled “Join or Die” the image evolved to warn adversaries not to mess with the United States.
A coiled rattlesnake, fangs bared with tail rattling, sends the message that if you step on my rights I will kill you. This is what the most zealous Trump supports are telling us now, and they aren’t armed with Revolutionary War muskets which took 20-30 seconds to reload.