Strange Things Afoot at the New York Times

The New York Times is never going to become a pro-gun publication, at least in any of our lifetimes. It’s too deeply in the NYC anti-gun bubble for that to be a real risk anytime soon.

But there is something odd going on. Last year, the Times brought in a Marine veteran and lifetime gun owner to handle stories about guns, reportedly trying to “bridge the gap” between those of us who are critical of their past coverage and those who have never seen a gun outside of television or the movies.

It’s been slow going, with some good coverage and some terrible coverage.

Yet it also seems that things are, in fact, changing, as the folks over at the Buckeye Firearms Association argue.

If you look closely enough, squint hard to focus, and read under perfect lighting, you might be surprised to find that the New York Times appears to possibly be showing some positive signs on its coverage of firearms and gun policy.

It’s nothing earth shattering. They aren’t calling for Americans to all rise up and freely exercise their Second Amendment rights. They aren’t endorsing universal constitutional carry or national reciprocity. But there could actually be some room for positive reinforcement and praise for the news behemoth on some recent reporting, albeit given cautiously.

The paper of record’s full history of reporting on guns is not at all surprising as it has consistently supported strict gun control and given effusive praise to gun control activists in their never-ending crusade. The Times has also demonstrated an embarrassing lack of basic firearm knowledge and blatant disregard for the truth before when covering topics related to the firearm industry and gun rights. That being said, credit where credit is due to The New York Times for actually publishing a few articles recently related to firearms, who’s buying them, and why and even noting as “skeptical” Mexico’s lawsuit to hold lawful firearm businesses liable for the criminal gun violence committed within its own borders by Mexican narco-terrorists.

Any signs of progress at that outlet can at least be given some positive reinforcement.

That’s a fair point, and many of the stories lately have been, at a minimum, fair. Not all of them, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and other such cliches.

Yet there’s another datapoint that’s not in there. It’s a report from today, where they look at Bondi’s decision to take authority to restore gun rights to people from the ATF, thus going around funding prohibitions that kept the ATF from doing any such thing in the first place.

All across the nation, anti-gunners are screaming bloody murder about it.

The Times, though, took a different approach.

It starts with the headline, which reads, “Trump Administration Prepares to Give Gun Rights Back to Some Convicts.”

That right there is far more accurate of a headline than what we’ll see from the usual anti-gun suspects.

If that was all there was, though, that wouldn’t be quite enough. It’s not, though.

The Justice Department plans to create a path for people with criminal convictions to own guns again, an issue that became contentious at the agency when officials there sought to restore that right to the actor Mel Gibson, a prominent supporter of President Trump’s.

The move would hand a victory to gun rights supporters less than a year after the Supreme Court ruled that the government could restrict firearms access to people facing restraining orders for domestic violence. Shortly after Attorney General Pam Bondi was confirmed in February, Mr. Trump ordered a review of the federal government’s gun policies.

The department still supports laws ensuring “violent and dangerous people” cannot lawfully acquire firearms, as long as there is “an appropriate avenue” to restore rights to people who have earned the chance to own guns again,  according to an interim rule set to be published on Thursday in The Federal Register.

Determining whose gun rights should be restored depends on a number of factors, the notice says, including “a combination of the nature of their past criminal activity and their subsequent and current law-abiding behavior.”

That is an accurate assessment of what is set to happen. I can hit them over accepting a fired DOJ employee’s claim that she was fired for not putting Mel Gibson’s name on a list–I don’t doubt that the incident happened so much as that being why she was fired. We only have her word for it, so far as I can tell–but the rest?

The rest is pretty solid. These are the first four paragraphs, and the important information–info normally buried near the bottom in most publications’ past reports on gun issues–is right there for the world to see before the figure they know enough and click away.

It’s a pretty fair reporting of the facts as they stand. It’s what the Times should have been doing all along.

Now, let’s think about this and its relationship with what’s happening at the Washington Post.

Two of the nation’s leading newspapers are seemingly done hitting the hard anti-gun position, at least in some regards. The Times, in particular, is making a concerted effort to be fair with regard to gun owners, gun rights, and gun politics in general.

What will the result of this be?

The crowd that takes these publications seriously may be also going to start thinking of guns differently. They might stop being so dead set on infringing on our rights for a change.

Hell, if they keep it up, I might even subscribe.