NY Times Page 1 Editorial: Guns ‘Are Weapons Of War’ and Must Go Now
In “End the Gun Epidemic in America,” its first front-page editorial since 1920, The New York Times argues that “It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.”
The paper announced on Friday that it would be publishing the page 1 editorial in Saturday’s edition, explaining that they wanted “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.”
Deliver they did, because the NYT‘s editorial board didn’t hold back any punches when it came to vilifying their chief targets: America’s gun industry, the lobby that supports it politically and the politicians who do nothing despite countless mass shootings and smaller, gun-related tragedies.
“These are weapons of war,” read the editorial, “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, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.”
The short piece barely breaks 500 words, but its message is clear: guns are the problem, and many (if not all) of them must go.
“It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.”
[Image via screengrab]
