End the Gun Epidemic in America...By THE NYT EDITORIAL BOARD

[mystery-ak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/opinion/end-the-gun-epidemic-in-america.html?ref=opinion

End the Gun Epidemic in America

​It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.

By THE EDITORIAL BOARDDEC. 4, 2015

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 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.

continued

[Scottftlc]

Always wrong all the time...but they are loved in the oval orifice

[sinkspur]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/new-york-times-gun-control-editorial_5662644ee4b08e945fefbb50

The New York Times' Front-Page Editorial On Gun Control Is Bad

It ignores most gun violence.

Nick Baumann
Senior Enterprise Editor, The Huffington Post

12/05/2015 01:16 am ET | Updated 10 hours ago


On Saturday, The New York Times printed a front-page editorial -- its first since 1920 -- calling for greater restrictions on gun ownership in the United States. You can read the piece here, but be warned: It's deeply flawed.

The Times doesn't use the term, but the policy it's advocating is what's generally called an assault weapons ban. Assault weapons bans are hard to write and implement, and easy to undermine and circumvent. Even a perfect assault weapons ban wouldn't do anything about most gun violence, because most gun violence involves handguns that aren't forbidden under such laws.

The Times' editorial board claims, without evidence or argument, that "it is possible to define" "in a clear and effective way" "certain kinds of weapons ... and certain kinds of ammunition, [that] must be outlawed for civilian ownership." But previous laws targeting "certain kinds of weapons" in the U.S. have generally failed to achieve their goals. The federal assault weapons ban passed in the 1990s was riddled with loopholes, and a Justice Department-funded study found little evidence it saved lives. And, as my colleague Daniel Marans reported Friday, the shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino on Wednesday used legally purchased rifles that escaped California's assault weapons ban because of a loophole.

Regular readers of The New York Times already know about the problems with assault weapons bans: Last year, the paper co-published a story by ProPublica's Lois Beckett on the subject. The Times headlined it "The Assault Weapons Myth." And as Beckett reported in another story, even gun control groups such as the Brady Campaign for Gun Violence and Everytown for Gun Safety have de-emphasized assault-weapons bans, opting to focus their attention on measures that are more likely to be effective at preventing gun violence.

There's a good reason for gun-control groups' caution: As Beckett noted in her piece, most gun violence in America involves handguns. But the Times editorial does nothing to deal with that hard truth. The word handgun does not appear in the piece. To the Times' credit, it mentions that its plan would require some gun owners to give up their weapons. But it doesn't explain how the government would go about getting people to surrender them. There are 300 million guns in American homes. Confiscating even a small percentage of these -- the Times' "certain weapons" -- would be an enormous, dangerous, and politically fraught undertaking. Banning civilians from owning "certain kinds of ammunition," as the Times also suggests, would be even harder.

Perhaps most glaringly, though, this editorial fails to mention that electoral politics -- specifically Republicans' dominance of the U.S. Congress and the fact that some Democrats seem to be more afraid of the NRA than they are of gun control groups -- is the biggest reason why President Barack Obama wasn't able to pass even modest gun control measures in the wake of the Newtown massacre. Congressional Democrats tried pushing new gun control measures again on Thursday, by the way. Republicans blocked them all. But "if you want gun control, vote for liberal Democrats for Congress" would be a short editorial.

[GourmetDan]

The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe...

The only person whose job it is to keep you safe is YOU.

Assigning that job to someone else only demonstrates your complete inadequacy as an adult member of society...

[andy58-in-nh]

To the contrary: it is the New York Times and the liberalism that informs and defines its ideology that insists blinding everyone at once about guns, and about everything else. Weapons of each and every kind possess no intentionality. They cannot make manifest their own purpose because by themselves, they lack the will and ability that human beings possess.

A gun does not care about the use to which it is put, nor can it decide upon when and where and under what circumstances it might be employed. Only a thinking human being may make that decision, and that decision is ultimately informed by the values inherent in the person who uses a gun, for whatever purpose.

Guns do not create crime, nor do they incite criminal behavior. In a vast majority of the uses to which they are put, they are uninvolved with criminal behavior at all. But in the hands of the vast majority people who are not criminals or insane, they may act to prevent crime or interrupt its commission. They also serve to protect and defend citizens against the monopoly of force known as government, when that government exceeds its legitimate authority.

America's founders were well aware of what happens to a people when disarmed against their government, and enshrined that knowledge in the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution, which at this late hour still stands as law. 

After the rights of free speech, assembly, faith, and privacy, there is no more valuable right than to protect one's self and one's family by force of arms, and no person, no group, and certainly no newspaper should ever mistake that right for a mere policy preference revokable at will.

When the government refuses to enforce existing laws against violent criminals, for whatever reason, it should not be the innocent citizen who is made to suffer.