• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, December 7, 2015

Another mass shooting, another ritualistic debate over gun control -- the two sides playing out their roles with tragic precision, a political kabuki play that unfolds the exact same way, time and time again.

Well, maybe not exactly the same.

This time, following the mass shooting in San Bernardino which left 14 dead, The New York Times took the unprecedented step of running an op-ed on the front page of its print edition, for the first time in 95 years.

The high-profile placement, which also received top billing on the Web site, deemed newsworthy even by other news organizations, built expectations for a call to action that would lay out a radical change in approach, delivering new insights and changing the terms of the debate.  

However, it did none of those things.

Instead, the NYT’s editorial board produced an intellectually hollow piece, revisiting well-trodden ground with rhetorical flourishes bound to resonate with its core audience, but presenting nothing new that might sway gun-control opponents.

Firmly ensconced in one of the hermetically sealed echo chambers that characterize modern American politics, the newspaper of record for center- and left-leaning Americans was preaching to the choir.

The NYT editorial made plenty of good points, familiar to anyone sympathetic to this cause, but failed to address the key issues that stand in the way of gun control: public opinion, the political landscape and above all, the Constitution itself.

Taking these points in reverse order, the NYT skated around the awkward fact of the Second Amendment, with a mix of righteous indignation and wishful thinking, which couldn’t distract from glaring logical elisions.

On the need to ban assault weapons, the op-ed board wrote: “These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection.” But insurrection is exactly what the Second Amendment intends. In the context of the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers believed the right to bear arms is “necessary to the security of a free state,” because it would allow citizens to resist any government that lapsed into tyranny.

At least, the NYT acknowledges that a constitutional obstacle exists, in reference to gun control opponents. “They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist.” However, it then dismisses these concerns -- the critical core issue of the debate -- with a breezy and intellectually vacant statement: “It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.”

Attempting to reduce the irreducible with a flippant aside, this throwaway statement completely ignores the question of how to implement “reasonable regulation” of firearm ownership when “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The NYT vaguely wants to eliminate “some large categories of weapons and ammunition,” including assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Very well, how? A simple law passed by Congress isn’t going to cut it, nor will an executive act by President Obama, as neither would withstand scrutiny by the Supreme Court.

The only answer to this conundrum, which the op-ed carefully avoids mentioning, is amending the Constitution -- but as the NYT editorial board well knows, the political landscape makes this impossible. The idea of two-thirds of both Houses of Congress agreeing on anything, aside from the cafeteria menu, is laughable. The idea of three quarters of the states doing so is in the realm of fantasy.

While the final consideration -- public opinion -- is more subjective, I believe the NYT also gets it wrong here, by treating gun control separately from terrorism. The editorial board writes that opponents “distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.”

In equating the attacks, the NYT is making a major tactical mistake, by minimizing the public’s entirely justified concern about radical Islamist terrorism, which presents a different type of threat from lone attackers moved by mental illness or workplace grievances.

As the attacks in Paris demonstrated, a cell of 10 terrorists armed with assault weapons can inflict far greater damage than a single unhinged individual. From a rhetorical perspective, the NYT would have been wiser to emphasize this connection, positioning gun control as an indispensable tool for countering radical Islamist terrorism in particular (as President Obama did in his speech) in addition to limiting other types of violence.