How the 'New York Times' and Loretta Lynch Made Me Join the NRA

I am not a complete stranger to guns. I got my merit badge in riflery when I was a kid and have dropped in on a firing range now and again, learning the basics on Glocks and Berettas. I even went shooting with former Governor Rick Perry of Texas.

But the NRA was always a bridge too far. I interviewed Wayne LaPierre, its CEO, once for PJTV, but I never joined. I’m still a Jewish boy from New York whose mother cringed at buying him a cap gun.  It’s not in my DNA.

The New York Times and Attorney General Loretta Lynch have finally put an end to all that. Hello again, Mr. LaPierre. Here’s my twenty-five bucks.  Send me that rosewood knife.  I’m in.

I don’t know which is worse, Ms. Lynch or the NYT. Actually they’re closely related, but let me start with the paper.  They published an editorial Friday (“End the Gun Epidemic in America“), contra the 2nd Amendment and calling for the confiscation of arms:

 Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

The amazing, and revealing, aspect of the editorial is that only days after the San Bernardino attack the words “Islam,” “ISIS,” “jihad” or anything resembling them are not mentioned in this editorial (as if they were complete anathema), only the amorphous “terrorism.” To wit:

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.

They are? Well, yes, in the sense that people have been killed.  But for radically different reasons. In the cases the NYT seems most to abhor, random crazy people have attacked abortion clinics and churches. This is horrible and more than extremely regrettable but far more infrequent and considerably less violent than the attacks in the name of Allah happening on an almost daily basis across the world from Mumbai to San Bernardino.  These attacks, what the NYT blithely calls “sprees,” are nearly always accompanied by overt declarations of war against Western civilization.  You would have to be, in Andy McCarthy‘s words, willfully blind to find them in any way equivalent.

I wouldn’t doubt the editorial board of the NYT is also aware that the policy of the Nazi party was pretty close to what they are recommending, the confiscation of guns — for the National Socialists so that they could be sure they were only in the hands of those deemed acceptable (not Jews, etc.).  To use Orwell’s term this time, that would make the NYT “objectively pro-fascist.”

But perhaps less harmful than our own government.  Reacting to the San Bernardino Islamic ideology-based terror rampage… er, workplace violence… the first thing out of our attorney general’s mouth was to warn James Comey, director of the FBI, that the real danger from this event was anti-Muslim backlash and to watch his language.  In other words, don’t call a duck a duck. According to DCWhispers, the order had come down from Obama and Jarrett to Lynch, in which order was unspecified, that Comey’s statements should be bowdlerized. It was.

Okay, I’ve had it. Mr. LaPierre, as I told you, I’m in.  You’ve got another one-time Jewish lefty in the NRA.  That should make at least one of us.

(By the way, to demonstrate my new bona fides,  I am writing this from the Bullets & Bourbon event at Rough Creek Lodge in Glen Rose, Texas.  It’s been great.  Hope you can make it next time. Photo above features me with Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, PJM’s Dr. Helen, and Nina Yablok, PJM’s attorney, at Rough Creek Lodge’s tactical shooting station.)