PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
NY Times on the warpath for gun control :: 12/17/2015
An Islamic terrorist attack this month in San Bernardino, Calif., has inspired the New York Times' editorial board to go hard after gun control, as the newspaper has published eight pieces in the past 13 days decrying America's culture of gun violence.
On Dec. 2, as Americans slowly learned more about the two terrorists who shot and killed 14 people in a California-run facility for persons with mental disabilities, the Times was quick to denounce the "gun lobby" and pro-Second Amendment lawmakers.
"Are these atrocities truly beyond the power of government and its politicians to stop?" the editorial board asked in a post titled "The Horror in San Bernardino."
"That tragically has been the case as political leaders offer little more than platitudes after each shootout, while the nation is left to numbly anticipate the next killing spree," the board added. "Those who reject sensible gun controls will say anything to avoid implicating the growth in the civilian arsenal."
The Times suggested that "Republican politicians" and "the gun lobby" made the attack in California possible.
"Congress has allowed the domestic gun industry to use assorted loopholes to sell arsenals that are used against innocent Americans who cannot hide," the Times said. "Without firm action, violent criminals will keep terrorizing communities and the nation, inflicting mass death and damage across the land."
Law enforcement agents killed the San Bernardino shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 27, a few hours after the attack.
On Dec. 4, after it became clearer that the attack was tied to Islamic terror, the Times kept at it, banging away at GOP lawmakers and the "gun lobby" for opposing "common sense" reforms.
"The evolving situation has forced Republican leaders and presidential candidates to contort themselves: talking tough on terrorism, yet ignoring the fact that the two were armed to the teeth with two .223-caliber assault rifles and two 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistols, and hundreds of rounds, all purchased legally," the board said in an article titled "Tough Talk and a Cowardly Vote on Terrorism."
For opposing an amendment designed to strip Second Amendment rights from anyone on the federal government's terror watch list – a database the Times has long opposed – Republican lawmakers supposedly proved that they are not interested in "shielding the public against violent criminals," the newspaper argued.
"[W]hen a mass shooting at home calls attention to laws that put guns into the hands of suspected terrorists, [GOP lawmakers] ask for a moment of silence, while taking action that speaks volumes," it added.
That same day, in an editorial titled "Fear Ignorance, Not Muslims," the Times implored its readers to not take their fears out on members of the Muslim community.
The paper also argued that though terrorism is real, shooting sprees like the one in San Bernardino come in all shapes and sizes: "workplace resentments, anti-abortion and anti-government zealotry, paranoia, suicidal megalomania, various other forms of sociopathy, and by no evident reasons at all."
That weekend, on Dec. 5, the Times published a front-page editorial, the first since 1920, calling on all decent 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," the editorial board argued in the piece, "End the Gun Epidemic in America."
On Dec. 9, the Times once again revisited the topic, publishing an editorial 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, including "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 Americans must first do something about this.
And there was more to come. On Dec. 11, the Times suggested in an editorial, titled "Gunmakers' War Profiteering on the Home Front," that it's all too easy for anyone to walk into a store and legally buy military style "assault weapons" designed for "rapid spray-shooting of multiple enemy soldiers in wartime, not homeland civilians living in peace."
"[T]he latest casualty count of 14 killed and 21 wounded last week in the gun carnage at San Bernardino, Calif., is another horrendous confirmation of how these easily available weapons — marketed as macho tools for a kind of paramilitary self-defense — are being used again and again for rapid-fire attacks on innocent people," the editorial said.
"The fact that the California killers were self-proclaimed Islamic warriors makes the ease with which their arsenal was assembled all the more outrageous," it added.
The editorial failed to mention that while Farook and Malik obtained their weapons legally, they broke several state and federal gun laws by making illegal modifications to the weapons. The Wall Street Journal noted that it takes "some expertise" to make these modifications.
Later, on Dec. 12, the Times came back for more, calling for the repeal of a 2005 federal law limiting the number of wrongful death lawsuits that can be brought against gun manufacturers.
"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 board said in an article titled "Despair Over Gun Deaths Is Not an Option."
Lastly, on Dec. 14, the editorial board 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."
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/ny-times-on-warpath-for-gun-control/article/2578357
