The President’s Paltering on Guns

It would be a shame if President Biden’s visit to New York to talk about guns were to pass without addressing his paltering in respect of the Second Amendment. We say that because when Mr. Biden started talking about the need for more regulation of guns he paused to address the trouble into which he was about to stumble, and did so with the following words, quoted herewith exactly as they appear on whitehouse.gov:“And again, for any of the press in here, the press listening: This doesn’t violate anybody’s Second Amendment right. There’s no violation of a Second Amendment right. We talk like there’s no amendment that’s absolute.”Let us leave aside the question of whose point Mr. Biden was making when he said “We talk like there’s no amendment that’s absolute.” We’re happy to chalk that up to the kind of verbal bumbling that could happen to anybody, even Demosthenes. He was talking, as near as we can decipher, about his proposal to ban high capacity magazines. And he was right to sense that he was venturing onto dangerous ground.When the Second Amendment was passed, the President averred, “it didn’t say anybody can own a gun and any kind of gun and any kind of weapon. You couldn’t buy a cannon in — when the — this — this amendment was passed. And so, no reason why you should be able to buy certain assault weapons.” Then the president, again sensing he was on dangerous ground, said, “But that’s another issue.”In the view of millions of New Yorkers, it’s the central issue. For the fact is that it’s not just “certain assault weapons” that New Yorkers are denied the right to “keep and bear.” The truth is that it’s difficult — and in New York City essentially impossible — for even a law abiding citizen to carry any pistol, even ones that would have been legal at the time George Washington strode our cobblestones.Nor is this an issue just for Republicans and conservatives. We’ve often written in these columns about one of the New Yorkers we admire most, Craig Whitney, now retired from a long career with the New York Times. He’s as fine a liberal as has ever lived in America. He served as an officer in the Navy and, when he was in Vietnam, carried a .45. He’s a grandfather and one of America’s greatest church organists.Yet for his own good reasons, he’d like to be able to carry a pistol. He doesn’t necessarily want to actually carry one. He’d like to be able to do so, but would be denied a permit. That offends his sense of the Constitution. He got so perplexed about about it that some years ago, he wrote a book, “A Liberals’s Case for the Second Amendment.” In it he notes that he doesn’t need a permit to work as a journalist under the First Amendment.So why does he need one to carry a gun under the Second Amendment? He understands that in the founding era, there were plenty of gun regulations. Yet he questions the notion that keeping guns from as many law-abiding citizens as possible is the way to keep guns from criminals. The editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, has also questioned the logic of pressing for ever-wider gun control without addressing this point.“The Case for More Guns (and More Gun Control)” was the headline over Mr. Goldberg’s report. The sub-headline was: “How do we reduce gun crime and Aurora-style mass shootings when Americans already own nearly 300 million firearms? Maybe by allowing more people to carry them.” We think it’s a good question. Chalk the current crisis up as evidence that gun control alone doesn’t work.Hence our oft-repeated policy and message to Mr. Biden. The New York Sun will refuse to support any increase in gun control regulations whatsoever — not one quark or gluon — until Craig Whitney gets to carry a gun in New York City. In ratifying the Constitution, the state of New York, in convention at Poughkeepsie, conditioned its ratification on a bill of rights that contained a right to keep and bear arms. They wouldn’t have ratified the Constitution if they’d foreseen New York today.

The President’s Paltering on Guns

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