After Islamic Terror, NYT Changes Subject, Takes Moral Preening on Guns to Front With Rare Page 1 Editorial

By Clay Waters | December 5, 2015 | 9:27 AM EST

After the massacre by radical Islamists who killed 14 and wounded 21 more in San Bernardino, Calif., the New York Times took its tasteless grandstanding on gun control literally to the front, in a rare front-page editorial, "The Gun Epidemic," calling for bans on civilian ownership for certain types of rifles and ammunition.

After joining the New York Daily News' anti-prayer brigade, the publicity stunt of an editorial briefly bowed to reality to admit that yes, there have been mass murders in countries with stringent gun control laws. Their rebuttal is a perfect encapsulation of liberal wishful thinking: "But at least those countries are trying."

On Friday's front page the "paper of record" refused to characterize the motive of the mass murderers: "A Couple Who Lived Quietly, Motives Unknown." That was despite the ever-clearer picture being painted of the couple's links (now confirmed) to Islamic terror.

Saturday's front page then changed the subject entirely, calling for new legislation to fight not Islamic terror, but the Second Amendment, in "The Gun Epidemic," calling American gun laws a "national disgrace" in the paper's first front-page editorial since 1920 (as the self-impressed Times informed us in the online version).

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But you knew the "But..." was coming, and it arrived in paragraph two:

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

California already has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, but you won't hear that from the paper. The Times even dipped its oar into the same slime that its anti-prayer colleagues at the New York Daily News did:

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.

Many people found it "callous" that all three Democratic candidates tweeted out calls for gun legislation before all the victims had been identified in San Bernardino.

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....

The Times' bottom line sure sounds like Australia-style gun confiscation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

And the big righteous finish:

What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?

The Washington Post quoted a statement from NYT Co. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., moral preener extraordinaire, that the editorial was intended "to deliver a strong and visible statement of frustration and anguish about our country’s inability to come to terms with the scourge of guns. Even in this digital age, the front page remains an incredibly strong and powerful way to surface issues that demand attention. And, what issue is more important than our nation’s failure to protect its citizens?"

Ever impressed with itself, the Times even ran a story on its own editorial placement on A14, "Debate Yields Page 1 Editorial."

Jonah Goldberg at National Review had some fun with the paper's PR stunt:

The Peace of Versailles, Buck v. Bell, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Ukrainian famine, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Marshall Plan, Jim Crow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kent State, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Watergate, withdrawal from Vietnam, the Killing Fields, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contras, AIDS, gay marriage, the Iran nuclear deal: These are just a few of the things the New York Times chose not to run front page editorials on.... So, by all means, this is exactly the moment to break a 95-year precedent and run a front-page editorial making the case for reforms that would not have prevented these murders, have no chance of passing Congress, and detract from the most pressing issues of the moment.

The Washington Post's Wonkblog hasn't gotten the memo, judging by this recent analysis: "We’ve had a massive decline in gun violence in the United States. Here’s why."

Arthur Sulzberger Jr.