It’s fascinating to watch the New York Times react to the decision of Guns & Ammo magazine to fire a columnist who’d endorsed regulating guns. The columnist, Richard Metcalf, had written a column asserting, that “all constitutional rights are regulated, always have been, and need to be.” Now he “has gone missing,” is the way the paper leads a long dispatch this morning under the headline “Banished for Questioning the Gospel of Guns.”

James Taranto has a column on it. The Times own dispatch, by Ravi Somaiya, runs to more than 1,300 words. It’s not the first piece the Times has transmitted on this story. It issued at least two items on Mr. Metcalf’s misery by its own columnist, Joseph Nocera, who is due for a Pulitzer on his campaign against guns. In one of them, Mr. Nocera reckons that Mr. Metcalf is the only person in the affair who “would could still hold his head up high.”

Mr. Nocera quotes Mr. Metcalf as writing in his own defense: “If a respected editor can be forced to resign and a controversial writer’s voice be shut down by a one-sided social-media and Internet outcry, virtually overnight, simply because they dared to open a discussion or ask questions about a politically sensitive issue…then I fear for the future of our industry, and for our Cause.”

This invites speculation as to what would happen were one of the Gray Lady’s own columnists to turn around and question the Gospel of the Times. What would happen were, say, Mr. Nocera himself to turn around and write that, after thinking about it all these years, he’s come to the conclusion that the Second Amendment ought to be enforced, even in New York City, where not even Mr. Nocera, a law-abiding, honest, sober, sane citizen can get a permit to carry a pistol?

What would happen were, say, Nicolas Kristof, who has campaigned against prostitution, to issue, under the headline “A New Look at the Oldest Profession,” a column endorsing prostitution? What would happen were, say, the Times conservative columnist, Ross Douthat, who tends to tread softly on the core social issues, to start a campaign for the Catholic teaching that sexual intercourse between men is immoral, abortion is murder, and same sex marriage is prohibited?

One can imagine that after someone fetched the smelling salts and got Mr. Sulzberger conscious again, the columnists would be out the door faster than you could say “liberal orthodoxy.” Let us just add that the Times would be completely within its rights to fire any such renegades. No one has a constitutional right to appear in the Times, nor to quarrel with the Times in its own columns. The right to decide what is printed in the press belongs to the owners of the press.

So why should anyone assert a right to campaign for the regulation of guns in Guns & Ammo? We always thought that Mr. Metcalf wrote a fine column in a fine magazine. It intrigued us when he endorsed the regulation of guns, though we didn’t agree with the column. Writing it didn’t strike us as courageous but rather, given the views of the paper that employed the writer, as a bit narcissistic.

The paper’s editor, James Bequette, seemed to understand this. He fired Mr. Metcalf and then resigned himself for having erred in running the column in the first place. Honorable. But the guts belong to InterMedia Outdoors, the publisher that stood not only by the Second Amendment but also by the First. It is the Amendment that protects the freedom of the owners of the press. That’s the gospel truth.