Following this week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, the media response has ranged from highly critical to disturbingly voyeuristic. The New York Times is taking a different approach. On Friday evening, the paper announced they would run their first front-page editorial since 1920. This is a bold move and one the paper hasn’t taken in 95 years (a moment when the paper voiced disapproval of Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding).
Here’s what Saturday’s front page looks like with an “End the Gun Epidemic in America” headline:
The piece published this morning and ran with fury, which was squarely aimed at at Speaker Paul Ryan’s Thursday announcement that Congress wouldn’t be drafting new gun control legislation any time soon:
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. 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.
After the Oregon shooting, President Obama asked voters to demand legislation for increased gun control. This editorial could go a long way to make that happen.
(Via New York Times)