IT’S IN TOMORROW’S NEW YORK TIMES, but as an InstaPundit Premium SubscriberTM — which is, well, everybody — you get access to it tonight! It’s my oped on municipal gun-ownership ordinances and why they’re a good idea. Read it, enjoy it, email it to your friends, whatever. And it’s absolutely free — just like everything else on InstaPundit. [What about the plans for “InstaPundit Select”? — Ed. On hold for the foreseeable future.]
UPDATE: Some people are surprised to see a piece like this in the New York Times. It certainly runs counter to their own editorial stance, but I should note that they solicited the piece based on a couple of blog posts I had; it hadn’t even occurred to me to write an oped on the topic.
And, interestingly, Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing is on the same page. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if opeds by bloggers bring more pageviews!
UPDATE: Cafe Hayek: “While I oppose statutes that mandate gun ownership, these statutes do strike me as being more consistent with the ‘public-goods’ rationale for state action than is most of what government does — and certainly more consistent with this rationale than are statutes that prevent peaceful people from owning guns.”
The mandatory nature of these statutes, as I note, is pretty notional — but in fact, the government clearly has the constitutional power to mandate gun ownership, and in fact did so in the past.
MORE: “Another sign of the apocalypse?” Heh.