I know Jeff Bezos said he wanted the opinion page of the Washington Post to focus on civil liberties and the free market, but a lot of us were skeptical of what that would look like. After all, a lot of people can contort themselves into a lot of opinions they say are about either the free market or civil liberties. Considering the paper’s history with its opinion page, I expected to see a lot of that.
But recently, the paper posted an editorial about the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which has been under fire pretty much since before the ink was dry.
And they actually defended it.
Yeah, I was shocked, too.
But it seems the NRA was just as shocked.
Indeed, we needled WAPO last week for the predictably comic resistance its staff showed toward being ordered to emphasize “personal liberties and free markets” in its editorials. “Freedom and capitalism will obviously not be easy or intuitive concepts for the editorialists of the flagship newspaper in the Nation’s Capital to promote,” we observed. We then used the paper’s support for banning AR-15s, America’s most popular centerfire rifles, to argue: “Second Amendment issues, in particular, will require a massive attitude adjustment and learning curve.”
We allowed for the possibility, however, that Bezos was trying to make positive changes at his troubled publication. Our piece concluded: “we are willing to give Jeff Bezos and his flailing newspaper a chance to right the ship … a shift toward a more patriotic and liberty-minded Washington Post … might just improve its bottom line, as well as its content.”
Tuesday’s editorial is at least a step in the right direction.
To be sure, WAPO didn’t get everything right. It began:
Well-intentioned advocates for gun control have in recent years tried to use the courts creatively to bankrupt firearms manufacturers. The clearest illustration of this is a $10 billion lawsuit filed by the government of Mexico, now before the U.S. Supreme Court, which alleges that seven leaders in the industry willfully fueled cartel violence south of the border, and demands court-mandated safety requirements around the marketing and distribution of guns.
These statements were right on the facts but wrong on the characterizations. “[C]reatively” abusing the legal system in concert with a corrupt foreign regime to assail a fundamental American liberty hardly betrays a laudable motivation; it is both cynical and unethical. Likewise, WAPO was wrong that the case is “only nominally about the Second Amendment and personal liberty.”
It was right, however, that what’s at stake concerns “the rule of law — and economic freedom.” Having thus identified a couple of concepts that could please its billionaire patron, the editorial went on to make a good case for why Mexico should, and probably will, lose the biggest case to implicate the PLCAA to date.
Look, I’m still shocked to see it myself. It wasn’t perfect, in part because they’re probably trying not to lose more of their typically anti-gun subscribers and are trying to play the role of convincing them that this is the right call, rather than just telling them it is.
I get it. The newspaper business is tough, and a lot of people think it should mimic everything they think perfectly, or else they’ll cancel their subscriptions. It’s a tough road to walk, to be sure.
Bezos said what he wanted, and I scoffed at it because nothing about Bezos’s politics has ever suggested anything at all that would lead me to expect his paper to defend the right to keep and bear arms, even if they tried to downplay what the case is really about.
Mexico wants to destroy the American firearm industry, and our own home-grown anti-gun activists are more than eager to help. They support the Second Amendment, but…they hate everything about it. They want this to go through so badly because it will allow them to essentially end private ownership of firearms without having to get a single new law passed, and they know it.
You don’t need to restrict gun sales if gun companies are too scared to sell to anyone but governments.
I expected the Washington Post to find a way to justify the lawsuit on some nebulous grounds framed as “protecting civil liberties” at worst or, at best, to just ignore it entirely.
Instead, we got something that was at least somewhat reasonable, even if less than ideal.
We’ve also seen the New York Times trying to temper its stance on guns of late, also, which is interesting. What this means remains to be seen, and the Times is still far from good on the issue, but it’s something to at least watch and study going forward.
Read the full article here
