One Man’s Shield
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The New York Times adds to its series of editorials on guns one issued Sunday bemoaning the immunity from liability enjoyed by the gun industry. It reckons the immunity, enacted at 2005, “has been notoriously successful at protecting gun makers and dealers and keeping victimized families from being heard in court on wrongful-death and damages claims.” It calls this “a denial of basic American fairness” and wants it repealed.
This argument is being advanced in the same columns that have been plugging for a shield for the New York Times Company and other manufacturers of newspapers. It wants them to be shielded by law against claims in court for them to disclose their sources. For that matter, it has sought in court a shield against claims for libel that might be lodged by, say, public officials the Times has gone after in the columns and advertisements of the Times.
The principle illuminated by this hypocrisy is that one man’s shield is another’s sword. How else to explain the fact that enacting of a shield for those exercising the Second Amendment is so horrible to a newspaper that attaches such importance to a shield for those exercising the First Amendment? Both Amendments, after all, are parts of the same Bill of Rights. Could it be that the Times favors only those parts of the Bill of Rights that favor its industry?
This question has bothered us for years, and the time seems right to propose the Bill of Rights Restoration and Hypocrisy Abatement Act. This would be a measure in the Congress that would require that if the Bill of Rights is to be respected at all, it must be respected equally and in all its parts. If there is to be freedom of the press, then there must also be freedom of religion. If the Grand Jury right belongs to civilians, it also must belong to police officers.
If the Bill of Rights Restoration and Hypocrisy Abatement Act is to have any meaning, it is that if there is to be discovered in the Third Amendment a right to privacy that would protect a woman buying a contraceptive then there also has to be discovered in the Third Amendment a right to privacy sufficient to protect, say, an unborn child. As a matter of law and policy, it would be only fair, balanced, and logical.
