The New York Times is in high dudgeon over Senator Cruz’s questioning of Senator Feinstein in respect of the assault weapons ban the Democrats want to bring back in the wake of Newtown. The new senator from Texas had asked the veteran senator of California whether she would consider it constitutional for Congress to specify that the First Amendment would apply only to certain books and not to books the Congress deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights. He made a similar point about the Fourth Amendment. The Times promptly issued an editorial calling Mr. Cruz’s question “sneering and condescending.”

The thing that gets us about this is that one of the most thoughtful articulations of this question was famously advanced not long ago by one of the veteran editors of the New York Times itself. This was Craig Whitney, who has just brought out a book called “Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment.” Mr. Whitney spent his whole career at the Times and is one of its most distinguished figures. He served in the Navy, was trained in arms, and carried a .45 at Vietnam. Yet he still can’t carry a gun in New York because he can’t demonstrate a need to be armed.

Mr. Whitney calls this “a strange state of affairs for a constitutional amendment that is part of the Bill of Rights. Consider that I don’t have to demonstrate a need for my First Amendment right of free speech. I don’t have to demonstrate a need for my Fifth Amendment right not to be compelled to incriminate myself, or for my Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial. Why should I have to demonstrate a need for my Second Amendment right, the right of the people to keep and use arms?” In other words, it’s not just right-wingers like Mr. Cruz who see a certain hypocrisy in the way the Second Amendment is viewed on the left.

In response to Mr. Cruz’s question Senator Feinstein took an uncommon amount of umbrage. “I am not a sixth grader,” she rumbled. She rattled on about how she’d been on the Judiciary Committee for twenty years and a mayor for nine years and had seen the consequences of gun violence first hand. But she dodged Mr. Cruz’s question. So he posed it again. At that point she said that “no” she didn’t think the government could ban books before she rattled on about the laws on pornography and the like. Eventually her committee reported out the ban she wants on certain semi-automatic rifles and clips on a party line vote.

We’ll see what the Senate does with it. Maybe it will pass it. But we ourselves wouldn’t vote for any part of it. The reason has to do with its illogic and unconstitutionality and with the Craig Whitney question. It has never been answered in a convincing way by anyone in the national debate. Ms. Feinstein seems to think it is constitutional to ban assault weapons, but Mr. Whitney is unable to carry in New York even the most ordinary six-shooter, and no proponent of gun control has ever demanded an answer to Craig Whitney’s question or disputed the right of New York City to impose a blackout of the Second Amendment. Maybe Ms. Feinstein can stew on that problem if she fails to get her bill through the Senate.