Right up front, the New York Times editorial page Sunday made it perfectly clear that it thinks the U.S. Supreme Court was flat wrong to rule 5-4 two weeks ago that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms applies to state and local governments through the 14th Amendment’s due process clause.
My colleague, National GRE David Codrea, writes about this here, and another colleague, Chicago GRE Don Gwinn, weighs in here.
So sad that the New York Times’ editorial board has become so anti-gun in its philosophy that they choose to continually use their First Amendment right in an effort to crush the Second Amendment. While they begrudgingly acknowledge that the high court ruling is "the law of the land," the fact that they argue a Draconian new gun policy adopted by the city following the high court’s ruling in McDonald v. Chicago – the Second Amendment Foundation’s lawsuit that achieved incorporation – is sensible is proof positive that Times editorial writers have lost any perspective they may have ever had on the subjects of liberty and civil rights.
We strongly disagreed with the reasoning that led the court to find an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, ending handgun bans in Washington, D.C., in 2008 and everywhere else last month. Nonetheless, the law of the land is now that people have a constitutional right to a gun in their home for self-defense.- New York Times
It is no wonder that the New York Times has had financial difficulties linked to declining readership. Who pays good money to read hogwash? The Times has abandoned common sense in its promotion of anti-gun dogma.
The Times believes the right to keep and bear arms should be restricted so tightly as to make it a highly-regulated privilege. Perhaps Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association – which has its own lawsuit against the Chicago handgun ban – summed it up best when he observed, “An individual right is no right at all if individuals can’t access it.”
Cities and states have a need to be extremely tough in limiting access to guns, but they need to do it with more forethought than went into theordinance. Lawmakers there sensibly limited residents to one operable handgun per home, with a strict registration and permitting process.- NY Times Chicago
Down at the Washington Post, the editorial board laments that the McDonald ruling is “troubling” because it raises the possibility for more legal challenges to onerous gun laws. Would the Post or the Times be so apprehensive if it were the First Amendment under attack?
This column finds it amusing that the NY Times cannot bring itself to publicly acknowledge that the Second Amendment Foundation was behind the Chicago case, when it simply made reference to “the same lawyers” that argued that case, and the earlier Heller ruling, have now challenged an anti-gun statute in North Carolina. Media elites cannot seem to acknowledge that there are serious gun rights organizations other than the NRA that are involved in the gun rights restoration effort. It is possible that these editorialists simply want to suppress the notion that there is more than one gun rights organization on the map; a revelation that this battle is not fought by a single entity, but by multiple groups.
The ruling is potentially troubling, however, for the same reason that Heller was: the threat that courts will step in to overturn reasonable legislative judgments that public safety requires certain restrictions on gun ownership. Accepting the court's holding that the Second Amendment protects a right to gun ownership in self-defense does not mean that judges should willy-nilly strike down every infringement on that right.- Washington Post
As fundamentally deplorable as it is for the NY Times to hold fast to its anti-liberty philosophy, it is conversely gratifying that their view is not shared by other newspaper editorial pages. Among newspapers that understand the Second Amendment is equal to the First was the Fort Meyers, FL News-Press. Reason magazine weighed in with a commentary about Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion that supported incorporation under the 14th Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause.
While editorial pages contrast and contradict one another, the fact remains that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and the city council have thumbed their noses at the Supreme Court. They admit they are pushing the envelope to make exercising the newly-recovered right as difficult as possible. Former Congressman Bob Barr takes the city to task in his Atlanta Journal-Constitution blog.
The City’s rapid response to such a situation is nothing short of blatant civil disobedience; a local government thumbing its nose at the nation’s highest Court.- Bob Barr
What a pity that the Supreme Court cannot dispatch United States marshals to Chicago to place Daley and his city council under arrest for contempt, because this new handgun ordinance is contemptible. This display of municipal arrogance is already being challenged in federal court, but it should not have to be.
There must be consequences for people like Daley. The NY Times is certainly facing the consequences of its elitism through falling revenues, staff cuts and sale of real estate.
A civil right is a civil right. It is not a privilege. What the NY Times advocates, and what the City of Chicago is practicing, is most assuredly a concerted infringement of a right that, according to the Second Amendment, “shall not be infringed.”
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Comments
The NY Times "That right can be limited, the court explicitly said, with reasonable restrictions. But it provided very little guidance as to what is reasonable, leaving lawyers, lawmakers and judges to thrash it out in a bog of lawsuits that could take many years to clear."
No. The supreme court does provide guidance " We made it clear in Heller that our hold-ing did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as “prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,” “laws forbidding the carrying
of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and gov-ernment buildings, or laws imposing conditions and quali-fications on the commercial sale of arms.” Id., at ___–___ (slip op., at 54–55). We repeat those assurances here.
Chicago, New York CAn regulate those 3 areas!
When the press loses touch with the public it shall cease to exist and that is what is happening right now with newspapers. At one time they shaped and controlled public perceptions but the internet changed all of that.Now they are held as accountable for the turth as they once held their sources and the subjects of their articles. The loss of readership indicates they are failing that critical test with the public. They are no longer the champions of public but the buffoons of the politicians and mouth pieces of a corrupt government. Their time is past because of their own actions and betrayal of public trust. In a free society when one attempts to overthrow the rights of others there is a price to be paid and in this case hopefully the New York Times, the Washington Post, and any other newspaper that advocates the loss of constitutional rights will pay it by becoming history and no longer endangering our rights. Newspapers should support the public not supress it's rights.
I graduated from West Point in 1994, during my four years there the New York Times was delivered to each morning to every cadet room. The first year cadets where required each morning to memorize the entire front page of the New York Times and were often quizzed on what they read by the upperclassmen. Being forced to read and memorize that rag for a year is probably my worst memory of my time at the Academy. The blatant lies, half-truths, and mischaracterizations all in the name of pushing their agenda disgusted me. Their motto is "All the new that’s fit to print", we used to joke that it ought to be "All the lies we want to print". When I began to hear about their financial troubles it didn't surprise me in the least, and actually encouraged me to think that people were finally opening their eyes to what the New York Times had actually become, a left-wing agenda driven propaganda machine.
Re: sending U.S. Marshalls - what would be more historically appropriate would be sending the Nat'l Guard in to escort moving vans after an aspiring gun store owner leases a location to open up shop. Now THAT I would like to see. 8)
My friends, we are in for a long expensive fight - think in terms of the nastiest divorce case you have ever heard of.
"Accepting the court's holding that the Second Amendment protects a right to gun ownership in self-defense does not mean that judges should willy-nilly strike down every infringement on that right."- Washington Post
The Post is absolutely correct. It is the second amendment that means that judges should strike down every infringement on that right, and there should be nothing willy-nilly about it. It should be a very organized effort. The law of the land demands it.
What Chicago is doing now is not any different than what southern state and city governments did after reconstruction to maintain the essence of slavery. Literacy tests and poll taxes and anything else they could legislate to keep freed slaves from voting and holding office.
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