The video above is NRA Commentator Dana Loesch’s second video attacking The New York Times, in no uncertain terms. (Click here to watch her opening salvo.) Like most NRA TV videos, Loesch’s lashing out at The Gray Lady has failed to garner many YouTube views. But The Times seems certainly to be paying attention . . .
Yesterday, the so-called newspaper of record published a piece riffing on the NRA’s firearms museum. In his editorial The N.R.A. Says, Go Ahead, Make My Fantasy, Francis X. Clines warms up his vitriol by taking the museum to task for glamorizing guns in its Hollywood-themed exhibit.
There are thousands of ingenious, gleaming rifles and handguns in displays about America’s gun-rich history of colonialism, immigration, expansionism and vigilante justice. But it is the gallery devoted to Hollywood and its guns and good-guy shooters that best illustrates the power of fantasy now driving the modern gun rights debate.
I don’t think Mr. Clines is a big fan of guns; he couldn’t resist adding “vigilante justice” to his description of our country’s firearms history. As opposed to, say, “defense against tyranny’ (which would include the NRA’s military rifles and firearms used by African Americans’ for armed self-defense against racist attack).
Mr. Clines has bigger fish to fry . . .
The N.R.A.’s latest priority is rooted in its ultimate fantasy that society will be safer if ordinary Americans are allowed to routinely pack a pistol. The organization is pushing Congress to pass a national concealed-carry reciprocity law to make it easier for people with state concealed-gun permits to carry their firearms nationwide.
This is part of the campaign to make gun possession ubiquitous among ordinary citizens. All states permit some concealed carry, but under vastly different safety controls. That is why opponents wisely fear that national reciprocity is a ploy to sell more guns and undermine stronger local and state gun controls.
I don’t think the word “stronger” means what Mr. Clines wants it to mean. The word he’s [not] looking for is “unconstitutional.”
Anyway, fake news! While Mr. Clines preamble “all states permit some concealed carry” skates over New Jersey and New York City’s de facto ban on concealed carry for ordinary citizens, Hawaii hasn’t issued a concealed carry permit in seventeen years.
The N.R.A. headquarters here keeps up a fresh drumbeat for the reciprocity legislation underway in Congress, 30 minutes away from the gun museum, with more than 160 co-sponsors signed up. President Trump, who supports the idea, is scheduled to address the association’s annual leadership forum on Friday in Atlanta. Both sides in the gun debate are keyed up for something John Wayne-like from the president.
Could The Times be any more disconnected from “flyover” America? So much so they reject the deeply American values that John Wayne embodied. The actor who once pronounced “All I’m for is the liberty of the individual.” Whatever Mr. Clines and The New York Times stands for, it isn’t that.