The National Rifle Association is complicit in acts of terrorism committed in America by mass shooters, according to the New York Times’ editorial board.
“Few places on earth make it easier than the United States for a terrorist to buy assault weapons to mow down scores of people in a matter of minutes,” the board said.
“And all this is made vastly easier by a gun lobby that has blocked sensible safety measures at every turn, and by members of Congress who seem to pledge greater allegiance to the firearms industry than to their own constituencies. There is a word for their role in this form of terrorism: complicity,” it added.
The editorial comes days after a gunman, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, shot and killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
The shooter, who swore his allegiance to the Islamic State Sunday morning during the rampage, was armed with a handgun and a Sig Sauer MCX rifle, which fires a 5.56 NATO round.
For the Times, Mateen didn’t act alone. He had help.
The NRA’s opposition to recently proposed gun control measures, including legislation that would bar people who appear on the government’s secretive terrorist watch list from purchasing a firearm, makes the gun rights group actively complicit in mass shootings.
“Most of the rest of the world figured this out long ago. But in the United States, the gun industry and its enablers continue to insist that the only solution is more guns, and more bullets flying,” the Times argued.
“The gun industry lobbyists may be beyond reason, but the lawmakers have a duty to respond to their constituents. Unfortunately, after each new massacre, far too many offer nothing more than condolences and moments of silence. That silence is killing us,” the board added.
To date, the Times’ editorial board has now blamed the NRA and the Republican Party for the Orlando shooting. Absent from much of the paper’s editorial analysis of the shooting this weekend are mentions of radical Islam, or the fact Mateen explicitly swore his allegiance to the Islamic State.
And though the editorial board mentioned Thursday that the Orlando shooter was affiliated with the Islamic State, the paper has mostly ignored this fact.
“While the precise motivation for the rampage remains unclear, it is evident that Mr. Mateen was driven by hatred toward gays and lesbians,” the board said in an editorial Wednesday.
But in a call that Mateen placed to 911 Sunday morning during the shooting, he reportedly said, “I did it for ISIS. I did it for the Islamic State.”
