The Pulitzer committee announced Monday that a series of anti-gun editorials penned last year by the New York Times put the newspaper in the running for 2016’s best in “Editorial Writing.”
The Times was nominated as a finalist in this category because it, “focused on the human cost of gun violence to argue powerfully for the nation’s need to address the issue,” the group announced.
Highlighted first as a prime example of the board’s focus on gun violence was a Dec. 5 piece, titled “End the Gun Epidemic in America,” wherein the newspaper called on Americans to give up firearms “designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency” for “the good of their fellow citizens.”
“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,” added the editorial, which was the first to run on the Times’ front page since 1920.
Of the ten articles selected as examples of the Times’ excellence in this specific category, eight were written in December of last year.
The committee also highlighted a Dec. 9 piece titled “An Opening for States to Restrict Guns.”
“[S]tates and cities have the constitutional authority and moral obligation to protect the public from the scourge of gun violence,” the board wrote, throwing its support behind several gun control efforts. That includes “laws restricting or banning certain types of weapons, magazines and ammunition, and prohibiting certain classes of people, like those convicted of stalking or multiple instances of drunken driving, from possessing guns.”
The “gun lobby” opposes all of these proposals, the Times argued, and America must do something about this.
A Dec. 13 Times editorial, titled “Despair Over Gun Deaths Is Not an Option,” which called for the repeal of a 2005 federal law limiting the number of wrongful death lawsuits that can be brought against gun manufacturers, also won a nod from the Pulitzer committee.
“If there are ever to be effective answers to the gun deaths now plaguing the nation, repeal of this egregious law — a denial of basic American fairness — should be near the top of the agenda if only to force the gun industry to worry about billions in damages for its abuse of public safety,” the Times argued.
Lastly, an editorial dated Dec. 14 again addressed the topic of gun control, suggesting that more restrictions would lower the number of gun-related suicides.
“No policy or education campaign is going to prevent every suicide. But that is no excuse for failing to save as many people as we can by improving gun safety and by protecting people who are a danger to themselves,” they wrote in a post titled “To Reduce Suicides, Keep the Guns Away.”
The category is defined by the Pulitzer committee as follows: “For distinguished editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction, using any available journalistic tool.”
The actual winner of 2016’s best in “Editorial Writing” was John Hackworth of Sun Newspapers for his, “fierce, indignant editorials that demanded truth and change after the deadly assault of an inmate by corrections officers.”
