(From: The Shooter’s Log) — Last week, the New York Times news­pa­per did some­thing remarkable—the paper ran an edi­to­r­i­al on its front page for the first time in near­ly 100 years. This has the poten­tial to be very good for gun own­ers, because the edi­to­r­i­al called for an out­right ban and implied con­fis­ca­tion of cer­tain types of guns, name­ly AR-pat­tern rifles. Admit­ted­ly, the Times edi­to­r­i­al board doesn’t have the firearms sophis­ti­ca­tion nec­es­sary to describe a cer­tain class of semi­au­to rifles accu­rate­ly.

Despite its finan­cial trou­bles, the Times is rel­e­vant because it sets a polit­i­cal agen­da for the New York City/Washington, D.C., cor­ri­dor, so gun own­ers should hope that already-anti-gun-rights can­di­dates, such as Hillary Clin­ton, Bernie Sanders, and Mar­tin O’Malley, endorse the Times’s far-out posi­tion on firearms, which includes the con­cepts of  “ban­ning” the pos­ses­sion of cer­tain types of firearms it does not like.

The Times edi­to­r­i­al, which ran in the Dec. 4 print edi­tion on page 1, was enti­tled “End the Gun Epi­dem­ic in Amer­i­ca.” Though it’s coun­ter­in­tu­itive at first, this edi­to­r­i­al may actu­al­ly be help­ful to firearm own­ers who want expand­ed gun rights—because the edi­to­r­i­al clear­ly, and pub­licly, con­tra­dicts the anti-gun­ner mantra that “nobody wants to take your guns.”

Sev­er­al promi­nent politi­cians from the left and hang­ers-on, very much want gun con­fis­ca­tion and have recent­ly pub­licly expressed that desire on numer­ous occa­sions. The dif­fer­ence is that we can now point to the NYT edi­to­r­i­al as a pub­lic dis­play of the pri­vate desire of anti-gun-rights politi­cians and orga­ni­za­tions, who have want­ed gun bans all along, but who knew that out­law­ing guns and tak­ing them away were tox­ic polit­i­cal posi­tions, except in a hand­ful of most­ly coastal states.

The Times wrote, “It is a moral out­rage and a nation­al dis­grace that civil­ians can legal­ly pur­chase weapons designed specif­i­cal­ly to kill peo­ple with bru­tal speed and effi­cien­cy. These are weapons of war, bare­ly mod­i­fied and delib­er­ate­ly mar­ket­ed as tools of macho vig­i­lan­tism and even insur­rec­tion.”

The Times left out the notions of self-defense, hunt­ing, and tar­get shoot­ing as just a few of the legal pur­suits AR-15s can be put to. It also failed to men­tion that it is not the gun com­mu­ni­ty, but rather the Fed­er­al government’s own admis­sion and def­i­n­i­tion that sep­a­rates the AR-15 from “weapons of war.”

Read More At: The Shooter’s Log