President Joe Biden’s call to ban assault weapons following Monday’s mass shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, has been wholeheartedly endorsed by the editorial board of the conservative New York Post.
“Get weapons of war off America’s streets,” the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, often a thorn in Biden’s side, declared in an op-ed published Wednesday.
“The New York Post does not see this as a conservative or liberal issue — it’s an issue of life and death,” the board wrote. “Curbing guns is what led to New York City’s three-decade reduction in murders. And, sadly, it’s the dismissal of that progress that has led to a rise in shootings here. Outside the city, the toll of semi-automatic weapons is a sad litany of cities and schools: Newtown, Parkland, Aurora, Las Vegas. It’s a national shame.”
The board recalled how it similarly urged then-President Donald Trump to ban assault weapons nationwide in August 2019, following mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. But with no significant changes forthcoming, “the bodies keep piling up,” the newspaper wrote.
Democratic and GOP centrists will have to “stare down their ‘ban everything’ and ‘ban nothing’ extremes,” it continued. “Start by writing an assault-weapon ban that focuses on firepower — rate of fire, muzzle velocity, and so on. Then move on to tighter, universal background checks, etc., reasonable waiting periods and all the rest.”
“Get started today, before the next horror hits,” the board concluded.