Zumbo and the New York Times

I don't expect the NYT to get much right on guns, gun owners, and the 2nd Amendment, but I would about half expect them to get journalism a bit better. The NYT has had its own problems with journalists and fired them. They get this much almost right,

"He of all people should have known that “ban” is the mother of all fighting words to gun zealots."

Zealots is an unfortunate word, pretty loaded and dismissive, for people who care about a right that is enumerated second in the BOR. You begin to get a feeling about where this is coming from, but what the Times is ignoring is that first part of the sentence about him knowing and the journalistic aspect of his statement,

“Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist,” he wrote, “but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity.” He added: “To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let’s divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the prairies and woods.”

The statement is not only inflammatory it is basically inaccurate. I have to wonder how long the NYT would keep a journalist around who publicly advocated the suppression of publication of news critical of government and used false information and analogies to present it.

"One or two say that instead of cementing their reputations for reflexively enshrining gun ownership above everything, they might have asked Mr. Zumbo what he was talking about. They might even have had a healthy debate. But they shot first."

So, the NYT would like to have a nice healthy debate about their right to publish on the basis of a false and inflammatory piece by one of their own? The NYT fires people for this kind of story. But that's about the news, not guns, thus sacrosanct. I did notice that a previous Editorial put a great deal of emphasis on governmental infringements of liberty and justice.