The liberal press is aghast that in the year after the tragedy at Sandy Hook — the anniversary of which is being marked today — no gun control measures have emerged from Congress. In that year, as of Friday evening, we are alerted by Joe Nocera’s column in the Times, there have been in America 11,460 gun deaths. Mr. Nocera links to slate.com’s gun tracker, which, at least as far as we could tell, doesn’t provide year earlier comparisons. We don’t want to suggest the stand-alone statistics aren’t heart-rending. Yet the Huffington Post reports on a study by Pew, which found that since Sandy Hook the views of our legislators haven’t changed but have even hardened.

That would be in accord with our own views. This newspaper will not support any new restrictions, nor most of the already existing restrictions, on guns until there is a proper obeisance in New York and elsewhere to the Second Amendment. Or, as we like to put it, until Craig Whitney can get a permit to carry a pistol. We have several times in these columns cited the former assistant managing editor of the New York Times. He strikes us as a perfect challenge to the liberal position. He is the soul of sobriety and good citizenship. He served in the Navy. He appeared in arms in Vietnam, carrying a .45 that he was trained to use as a military policeman. Since then he went on to his famous career, married, and settled in New York. He has a spotless record, nary a misdemeanor. Yet in New York he cannot carry a pistol.

This strikes him — and us — as a violation of the Constitution. It irks him enough that he has written an entire book, “Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment.” It has been brought out by an idealistically liberal publishing house, Public Affairs. In our favorite part of the book, Mr. Whitney remarks that he doesn’t need a permit to exercise the rights of a newspaperman under the First Amendment to the Constitution (he’s been doing it every day without ever being asked for a license). But if he tried to the exercise the right of the people to “keep and bear arms” that is vouchsafed in the Second Amendment, he’d need a permit. What is the logic of it? What is the constitutionality of it?

It happens that we asked what we called the “Craig Whitney question” of New York’s next (and former) police commissioner, William Bratton. This was just the other day at a lunch of the Gatestone Institute. Mr. Bratton strikes us as terrific choice to come back in as commissioner, smart, experienced, thoughtful, articulate. Yet he said that police officers shouldn’t have to worry about whether a person they’re approaching is armed. He said a lot of police officers feel that way. But the answer struck us as off the point. We were, after all, asking about Craig Whitney himself. We explained his circumstances in the course of asking our question.

Why in the world need anyone worry about Craig Whitney carrying a weapon? If even he — no mis-demeanor, trained, sober, well-known, cheerful — cannot bear a weapon in New York, what meaning does the Second Amendment have? The thing about the Second Amendment, like all the other amendments to the Constitution, is this. Every public official in New York City, in New York State, and in America is (and must be) bound by oath or affirmation to support it. That is their solemn oath. They must swear to support the Second Amendment. Mayor Bloomberg took that oath when he was sworn. Do New Yorkers believe he has kept that oath?

Our own view is that doubts on this question — doubts that are multiplied thousands of times across the country — are what lie behind the fact that in the year since Sandy Hook, one of the worst crimes ever committed on American soil, there has been no gun control legislation out of the Congress. Americans are not dumb. They can read plain English. They know what the Second Amendment says. They know their government is not following it. They know the Constitution can be amended. They know that not enough of the country wants to amend the Second Amendment for it to be anywhere near amendment. No wonder the Congress refuses to pass new legislation, even after such a horror as occurred a year ago today in Connecticut.