The New York Times ran its first front page editorial since 1920 in the Saturday morning edition. The article, titled “End the Gun Epidemic in America,” called for more gun control in the wake of what was arguably the largest act of domestic Islamic terrorism since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“All decent people,” the editors began, “feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California.” The politically liberal newspaper allowed that law enforcement should look for the “motivations” of deceased suspects Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, though it did not get around to naming them in the editorial. Other words absent from the piece were “Muslim” and “Islamic.”
“But motives do not matter,” the paper intoned, “to the dead in California.” The Times argued that while the FBI is sifting through the evidence and trying to see what sort of Islamic State terror network connections the married suspects may have had, Americans ought to direct much “attention and anger” at the firearms industry and at those politicians who abet weapons makers.
Picking up on the “prayer shaming” theme that has been popular with some pundits and newspapers this week, the Times said that “America’s elected leaders” who “offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequences, reject the most basic restrictions of weapons of mass killing” ought to be ashamed of themselves and fearful of voters.
The paper wrote off “arguments about the word terrorism” as a distraction. Its editors brushed off concerns about Americans’ constitutional right to “keep and bear arms” by calling it “unnecessary to debate the wording of the Second Amendment” and asserting that “no right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.”
In this case, the Times asserted that “reasonable regulation” would mean going beyond “halting the spread of firearms” to “reduce their numbers drastically” by “eliminating some categories of weapons and ammunition.”
The editorial called for a civilian ban on “certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition.” It also advocated confiscation, saying “yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.”
Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose control of the editorial page supersedes that of Times executive editor Dean Baquet, explained the extraordinary A-1 placement with a statement. The Times had put the editorial on the front of its print edition, explained Sulzberger, “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.”
