How The New York Times Let The Truth Leak Out

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posted on March 4, 2016
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You may not have seen it, but last week The New York Times gave a rare glimpse inside the mind of the U.S. gun-control movement today. 

So if you think the gun-ban movement has been defanged in this country ... 

... if you believe President Obama, or Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, or anyone else when they say they want just one more minor restriction on your right to own a gun ...

... or if you think this year’s elections are anything other than a do-or-die, decisive moment for your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, you need to read this. A deliberately misleading, painstakingly plotted sales pitch for every anti-gun scheme you can think of.

Barely three months after America’s self-described “Newspaper of Record” printed its first front-page editorial in 96 years—an editorial pushing gun bans and confiscation—The New York Times gave two of the nation’s leading legal luminaries a place to lay out their vision of the future (or non-future) of firearms and what kinds, why, where, when and whether you can own them at all. 

In an 823-word manifesto headlined “Tough Gun Laws Are Constitutional,” Abner Mikva, who’s led the gun-ban movement since the movement began, and Lawrence Rosenthal, a Harvard-educated law professor who clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, sketched out their map for the road to disarmament ahead. (Note that the Times changed the headline when posting the feature online, watering it down to, “Effective Firearms Regulation Is Constitutional.” Apparently they wrongly decided that “Tough Gun Laws” and “Effective Firearms Regulation” are one and the same.) 

I won’t go into their elaborate and deceptive hard-sell here.

“The need for tougher measures is clear,” they begin, conveniently ignoring the fact that crime committed with firearms—like all violent crime—is lower than it has been in 40 years, and gun accident rates have fallen by more than 90 percent over the past century, to the lowest levels recorded. 

From that just-because-we-say-it’s-so premise, they launch into a deliberately misleading, painstakingly plotted sales pitch for every anti-gun scheme you can think of: gun owner licensing. A ban on private transfers. Microstamping. Government lists. Gun registration. A central, federal database of every gun owner and every gun you own. 

Abner Mikva [Photo credit: Tim Boyle/Bloomberg via Getty Images]

In other words, everything leading up to—and everything needed—to impose and enforce gun confiscations, just as they’ve done in England and Australia, and just as Hillary Clinton has publicly admitted “would be worth looking at.”

Fact is, they don’t just want to institute so-called “universal” background checks as they want you to think—they effectively admit that background checks are meaningless since criminals don’t submit to them! Instead, they want to put the federal government in the middle of every firearm transfer in America, and give that federal government every kind of list, database, minimum standard for ownership and mechanism for revoking that right you can think of. 

In revealing what they really want, they confirm yet again what the National Rifle Association has long said: Each of their proposals is just the beginning. Their endgame is the end of guns.

And the only reason you may not have heard about it is because they’ve kept it under wraps. With few rare exceptions, they won’t admit to it. When they do, it’ll be to The New York Times or The San Francisco Chronicle or the Washington Post, where they hope you won’t see it, but where their fellow anti-Second Amendment jihadists can draw strategy, tactics and recruiting support. 

That’s why the NRA fights their schemes. And that’s why the NRA needs your help.

If you don’t think they want your guns, just look at their backgrounds. The heaviest hitters of the gun-ban movement during the past 50 years give a rare glimpse of their endgame for firearm freedom.

Abner Mikva may be the longest-serving, best connected, highest-ranking general in the war on Second Amendment freedom in Washington, or for that matter, the world.

Before he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama, before he mentored Obama in Chicago, before he worked on gun control in the Clinton White House, before Jimmy Carter nominated him to the second-highest court in the land—the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals—Mikva was a congressman who repeatedly, habitually introduced bills to ban the importation, manufacture, transfer and transportation of handguns, and “freeze” the number of handgun owners by banning any and every handgun transfer, so that handgun ownership would eventually die in America. 

Mikva was on the board of directors of the National Council to Control Handguns, which became Handgun Control Inc., and then the Brady Campaign. He bragged about being “the foremost anti-gun spokesman in the House of Representatives.” He called the NRA “the street-crime lobby in Washington.” As U.S. Sen. James McClure, the author of the landmark Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, said, “Mr. Mikva will go to any length to get your guns and my guns.”

Mikva’s co-author, Lawrence Rosenthal, is one of the most influential anti-Second Amendment legal scholars in America. He not only teaches America’s next generation of lawyers that the Supreme Court was wrong when it ruled, in Heller, that the right to keep and bear arms is your individual right—a notion Hillary Clinton vows to fight “every chance I get”—but he’s also laid the legal-theory groundwork to do exactly that. 

Lawrence Rosenthal [Photo credit: Rochelle Rose/Noozhawk]

Nearly 20 years ago, as legal counsel to Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, Rosenthal helped the city attempt to sue America’s firearms industry into bankruptcy. Today, he speaks at events hosted by the gun-ban lobby

Both of these anti-gun operatives have worked hand-in-hand with all the major players of the gun-ban movement for decades. From the first Clinton administration, to Obama’s Chicago machine, to Handgun Control Inc., all of the heaviest hitters in today’s gun-control arena have relied upon these two men to set the strategy, concoct the legal theories and help them impose their gun bans upon the American people. 

And if you don’t think your Second Amendment right to own a gun is in danger, all you need to do is look at the Times. It’s all there in black and white—proof positive that they’re lying when they say they only want a ban on semi-automatic rifles, or they only want to close some supposed “loophole,” or that they supposedly “support the Second Amendment.”

So when Hillary Clinton says that Australia’s gun bans and confiscation are “worth looking at”—or when Bernie Sanders pushes legislation to revoke the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act and expose America’s firearms industry to “death by a thousand cuts”—you’d better take them at their word. 

For once, they’re telling the truth about what they really want. So on Election Day, be careful what you ask for—because you just might get it.

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