The Liberty Daily 
(The Daily Caller)—The question of which outlet gun-control groups like Everytown, Giffords and Brady United hate the most doesn’t often cross the minds of gun owners, but The New York Times may have moved up that list with an article the outlet published Wednesday.
Why would The New York Times make it on Michael Bloomberg’s sh*t list? Why might Democrat Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other anti-Second Amendment politicians be throwing the Old Gray Lady across the room in frustration?
Well, the article the Times published was on the decline in popularity of modern semiautomatic rifles that superficially resemble the AK-47 family of assault rifles. You would think that would make someone like Schumer, who repeatedly invoked the AK to scare voters into supporting that 1994 “assault weapons” ban he and the late Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein rammed through Congress, happy, especially in this day and age where Russia is a designated villain, but not so fast.
The problem is that the Times article creates a few new hurdles for Schumer and other would-be gun banners. For starters, it acknowledges that the semiautomatic AK-style rifles were once “ubiquitous” – that’s a fancy Acela Corridor word for “common” – until the AR-15 established its dominance among the American civilian market, which creates a big problem for those who want to ban them.
If Fox News says it, that is one thing, but for The New York Times to do so? It is a double whammy of admissions, when you reread the article (and yes, this is one New York Times article worth re-reading).
You see, not only did the Times acknowledge the AK was in common use around the 1990s and 2000s in Wednesday’s article, but the paper also admits in that same article that today, the AR-15 is in common use. I can just imagine how sharply Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger must be staring daggers at New York Times reporters for the citation their outlet just handed to those filing certain lawsuits in those states that want to ban so-called “assault weapons.”
What’s the big problem with that admission? Well, back in 2008, former Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia, a Supreme Court decision that said what we’ve known all along about the Second Amendment: It protects the right of an individual to own firearms in “common use.”
“The handgun ban amounts to a prohibition of an entire class of ‘arms’ that is overwhelmingly chosen by American society for that lawful purpose,” Scalia wrote. Here’s where anti-Second Amendment groups will get really unhappy, though – modern semiautomatic firearms are also “overwhelmingly chosen by American society.”
The National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) estimated in January that as many as 32 million “modern sporting rifles” – their term for the AR-15 and AK-style semiautomatic rifles targeted in bills like the ban Spanberger signed Thursday. To put that into perspective, Ford made about 34 million F-150 pickup trucks since 1977.
Anyone want to try to sell the notion that the Ford F-150 is somehow “uncommon” or “unusually dangerous?”
Now, tack on Bruen v. New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, issued in 2022, and you can understand why Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is aggravated in Albany. Those bans on commonly-owned semiautomatic firearms are going to fare no better than her “vampire rule” (we can just say that the rule in question met Buffy Summers) for concealed carry did – probably even worse.
And for that, she can thank The New York Times.
