New York Times shows it's Nuts

Another contortion to make its argument from the old gray bag. m/r

The Gray Lady’s unexpected defense of the Second Amendment

Twisted Times by Dennis Saffran, City Journal 24 October 2014

It’s amusing to watch theNew York Times contort itself into a pretzel when one of its left-wing orthodoxies conflicts with another. Last Sunday, theTimes led its front page with Anemona Hartcollis’s remarkably sympatheticstory about claims by “mental-health advocates”—who typically advocate the “rights” of the severely mentally ill to refuse treatment and sleep in their own excrement on the sidewalk—that a New York law is making it difficult for mental health patients identified as dangerous to obtain and keep guns. A provision of the SAFE Act (“Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013”) requires mental-health professionals to report any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others,” and requires local gun-licensing authorities to revoke or suspend licenses held by these patients and to deny any new applications from them for five years after such a report. Any such revocation or suspension, or a patient’s continued ineligibility for a license during the five-year period, can be challenged in court under the state’s administrative-review statute.

The tone and prominence of Sunday’s article suggest that the Times has decided that its support for expansive rights for the mentally ill trumps its support for expansive gun-control legislation. Speaking favorably for what must be the first time of “the right to bear arms” (without a single harrumph about a well-regulated militia), the Times frets that the provision has denied this right to 34,500 “people with mental health issues,” though it notes that only 278 of them actually had gun permits. Trotting out its usual talking points about the rights of the mentally ill (rather than its usual talking points about gun control), the Times quotes unnamed “advocates” and “experts” who warn that such laws “stigmatize people with mental illnesses” and “discourage patients from seeking help.” They lecture us that “the vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent.” The Times also indicates concern that a court proceeding is the only recourse available to a reported patient and, in what must surely be another first, respectfully quotes a spokesman for the NRA, which favors the creation of an administrative-review process as well, “to make sure that ‘these decisions are not being made capriciously and maliciously.’”

The NRA makes a fair point. But it’s hard to imagine the Times giving a similarly sympathetic hearing to the NRA’s concerns that a gun control provision might “capriciously and maliciously” infringe “the right to bear arms” of law-abiding citizens without “mental health issues.”

-go to link-